community-based services
All countries suffer from problems of coordination among hospitals and community-based services (Knickman & Knover, 2015, Chapter 4). One challenge is accessing, which is still the greatest challenge to health delivery in Africa. Fewer than 50% of Africans have access to modern health care facilities. Many African countries spend less than 10% of their GDP on healthcare. Secondly, shortages of trained health care professionals from Africa because many of them prefer to live in places like the United States and Europe. There is also the increase in communicable and non-communicable disease such as AIDS, malaria, hypertension, which are increasing in the middle-class and the poor increases. I think the government is responsible for ensuring that everyone has access to healthcare. However, I don’t believe that healthcare is a public good that is the sole responsibility of the government in Africa. There should be an opportunity for entrepreneurs to enter the health delivery space in Africa to provide healthcare to the middle class and the working poor. African Counties need to embrace technology to close health care gap and private-public partnership in the health care system. In 2007, Becton, Dickinson, and Company (BD) and the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) entered into a public-private sector partnership focused on laboratory-system strengthening in sub-Saharan Africa (Cohen, 2016). This partnership is now known as “Labs for Life” was formed to help the people in low resource countries in Africa living with AIDS access to antiretroviral therapy.
According to Hader (2016),
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) align public and private needs around mutual goals to move vital projects forward. When PPPs work to strengthen the critical link in the healthcare system, such as laboratory networks, as demonstrated in this supplement by authors from the International Laboratory Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in-country officials from the respective CDC and Ministries of Health, implementing partners, and Becton, Dickinson, and Company (BD), they significantly change the landscape of healthcare and patient outcomes.
