What's needed is a new health model

Looked at this way, it is feasible that ‘focusing' might well go a long way to ensuring that all healthcare service providers are better empowered and motivated to service excellence and that patients and their families are the ultimate winners.

As with any sector, needs and trends are continually shifting and what worked 10 years ago can't be expected to work half as well now, therefore it would make sense for any restructuring of the Southern African healthcare infrastructure to look well ahead in the planning at models that are going to work in the long term. And that is not easy to do, when you are mired down in the daily crisis management of the landscape of our current healthcare requirements.

Health by design

The results of the audit by the Gauteng Dept of Health's PHC into Primary Health Care may offer a clue as to where the new ideas and opportunities lie in healthcare service delivery. George Kanyike is one of the few architects on the continent currently grappling with the “Shifts in practice paradigms due to Information and Communication technologies...therapeutic environments and construction cost drivers”, but this would be the least of his worries.

Rarely does the word design enter into discussion of a medical nature.

A Google search of Hospital Architecture reveals barely a handful of firms in the world currently specializing in hospital design, but with some of the most pressing healthcare requirements on the planet, you might want to check out some global case studies at http://www.concentric.net/~Medarch/medeng.htm, http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/maru/ and http://www.tpvarchitects.com/html/Projects.htm.

After all, there is no shortage of global digital, pharmaceutical and sundry consultant service providers in this sector, with sponsors like Fujitsu, Sanofir-Aventis and KPMG on board. Fujitsu, for example, based their case study presentation on experience gained in similar conditions in India. It should not be too big a big leap to tap into the global experience of brick and mortar service providers either, in order to address the backlog in suitable hospital infrastructure. Our region is turns out is unsurprisingly grossly under-equipped with the required satellite community services such as mobile clinics, support group facilities, paediatric and breastfeeding clinics, youth groups - all of which are in effect further opportunities for positive engagement with local and global stakeholders.

One thing the sector is not short of, is acronyms… when you're done with PHC, GDoH and HRP's [Hospital Revitalisation Programme] and PPP's [Public Private Partnerships] to name a few, you can move on to DHIS [District Health Information Systems], HDM [Hospital Data Management], HISB and HMIS which is, as I understand it, is where the nitty-gritty, of disease surveillance figures and other essential population data come into play. But there's more.

Am I doing something?

Acronyms are also the language of the enemy - the elephant under the carpet in African healthcare is HIV/AIDS. All of the above initiatives pale by comparison to the social, mental, psychological, emotional, physical, spiritual and financial implications of living with the HI virus in our midst.

Aspen Pharmaceuticals is proudly home-grown, the largest generics manufacturer in the Southern hemisphere and one of the leading global players in generic anti-retrovirals (ARVs) today. http://www.aspenpharma.com/. In her key role as Product Manager of Aspen Pharmaceuticals Nellie Maphumulo unpacked the clinical and biological nature of the treatment process with chilling clarity and empathy and urged us to remember the acronym as not only standing for Human immunodeficiency virus, but also as the call to action Am I Doing Something?

Maphumulo explained how, not only does the HI Virus kill off human white blood cells, it ensures that the cells themselves, produces a new HI virus before dying. This is one of the reasons it is so difficult to treat, necessitating the production of scores of generics that anticipate virus behaviour. It then becomes clear, why non-compliance is cited as one of the key reason for the failure of much HIV treatment programmes.

You need a degree to medicate yourself, with the AZT, ZPV, d4t, NRTI, ddI and scores of others inhibitors lined up to confront the virus in all its forms and stages, making the need for ongoing patient support increasingly vital. Surely compliance of the birth control pill would have been considerably less, if it had not been presented in such well thought out blister packaging? When it comes to pharmaceutical package design, future innovations may well be key to watch to ensure global lead practice from our region.

As speaker and co-sponsor for the event, Grant Coote from Royal Sechaba, said in his address, “In the quest for new service delivery model... there is the need for us to embark on strategic partnerships” and that there should be more “collaboration and less suspicion between public and private sector”.

If we all have a common goal in the pursuit of investing in a healthier nation, knowledge sharing across all disciplines and amongst all players is key.