The Sub-Saharan Africa region faces unique challenges ranging from inadequate infrastructure to resource constraints in delivering health services to its population, especially to communities at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
To address these challenges, much is being done through forging and nurturing partnerships between corporate, public, and civil society to synergise efforts towards improving healthcare services in in the region.
The goodwill by governments has also enabled pharmaceutical companies to take up an active role in ensuring the SSA region is not excluded from accessing medicines and therapeutics.
However, over the past 20 years, addressing the major, unresolved global health challenges has evolved from purely donation-based programmes, towards models with sustainable social impact.
The drive to create expanded access for patients is also increasingly anchored on systematic public private partnerships (PPPs), such as the Familia Nawiri initiative spearheaded by Christian Health Association of Kenya (CHAK) hospitals and Novartis to manage diabetes, hypertension, heart failure, breast cancer, epilepsy, eye diseases, sickle cell disease (SCD) and malaria.
The Cardio4Cities initiative in Senegal has made significant inroads with an aim of increasing early detection of cardiovascular diseases and putting in place new clinical guidelines and data systems.
Within 18 months of the project’s duration, the percentage of patients with controlled blood pressure on medication tripled from 6.7 per cent to 19.4 per cent, while data captured grew from 470 to 6056 patients.
This data has provided more in-depth insights into a patient’s health and treatment, placing healthcare providers in a better position to deliver high-quality care.
Partnerships in capacity building among healthcare workers have also helped widen access to healthcare. For instance, the Familia Nawiri initiative in Uganda has partnered with the Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau (UCMB) and the Protestant Medical Bureau (UPMB) in Uganda to build the capacity of health workers, as well as creating awareness about non-communicable diseases (NCDs).
In the ophthalmology space, Novartis’ partnership with Sight life has helped create awareness about the importance of early screening in facilitating timely patient diagnosis and capacity building for primary eye health providers in rural areas.
Purpose-driven partnerships, such as these are fundamental to the overall success of players in the healthcare sector.
PPPs can create a common understanding around critical health needs, harness different strengths, and cultivate shared accountability between partners.
The writer is the Head of Novartis in Sub-Saharan Africa.
