Samia urges partnerships in health services innovation

Dar es Salaam. President Samia Suluhu Hassan yesterday called on the global community to partner with Tanzania in order to address key challenges facing innovations in the country’s health sector.

The Head of State outlined the key challenges as the lack of skilled labour, poor infrastructure development and inadequate funding among others.

She made the call during the live-streamed opening of the sixth edition of the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH 2022) held in Doha, Qatar. WISH 2022 is a global health initiative of Qatar Foundation organized under the theme “Healing the Future”.

Speaking during the event, President Hassan said despite progress made in innovation in Tanzania and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, states still face a number of challenges to enable their scale and diffusion within the health system.

“I therefore, I urge all to take this opportunity to seek ideas and discuss best ways on how we can address these challenges especially when innovation is focusing on addressing people’s needs,” she said.

She also said using locally available resources was crucial towards minimizing costs and ensuring sustainability and when innovation for life saving conditions were readily available for non-commercial use.

“And when collaboration is key for success and when innovations that focus on investing in the young generation will have a bigger impact in the future,” said President Hassan.

In relation to Covid-19, President Hassan said for decades now, many global health systems have been facing increasing demand for changing patterns of epidemiological and social demographic transitions.

She said globalization, urbanization and digitalization have brought changes, with an aging population over stretching the capacity of health systems to attain desired health outcomes.

“The Covid-19 pandemic magnified these patterns and waged division in human society. Most developing countries didn’t yield the opportunity provided by Covid-19 to undertake an integrated approach, but resorted to fragmented financing, planning, implementing and monitoring,” she said. “This approach didn’t address inequalities and disproportionate impact of health emergencies on vulnerable and marginalized populations,” she added.

She said the spirit of multilateralism must be involved in all the times when it comes to epidemics and pandemics, noting that the injustice of Covid-19 shouldn’t feature the future calamities.

“The rights of vaccine equity should be arrived at for all instead of the privileged few. Leaving a major part of the world out of the health innovation journey is injustice to humanity,” she said, adding that there was a responsibility to heal the future.

She said the future of the healthcare sector required improved health outcomes or innovations, recommending that local innovators should be encouraged to develop their local sustainable techs to improve health outcomes.

According to her, there was also a need to improve evidence informed guidance and policies in low and middle income countries to strengthen health systems and improve their receptiveness to innovations.

“It is our collective responsibility to design and implement innovation that will improve the quality of health services according to our circumstances to make healthcare safer and affordable to the population,” she said.

Moderna co-founder Noubar Afeyan said the world was not well prepared for another pandemic, noting that responses made after disease outbreaks lead to over utilization of resources and endangering lives.

“Early detection interventions that pre-empt disease or manage a pre-disease condition could offer a solution to health care,” he said.

Dr Afeyan who is also a serial entrepreneur, a founder and chief executive officer of Flagship Pioneering, a company that conceives, creates, resources, and develops first-in-category life science platform companies to transform human health and sustainability.

He cited how a study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 2017 revealed that nearly 98 percent of healthcare spending was on treatments for illness.

According to the finding, only two percent was set for interventions and diagnostics that had the potential to keep people away from getting sick.

“At the moment we spend an enormous amount of time and money treating people once they fall sick, rather than trying to keep them healthy,” he said.