Health Service Delivery

In a world where ‘NHS’ and ‘Obamacare’ are commonplace terms, where ambulances and doctors can be found on virtually every street corner, it can be difficult to understand all the fuss around Health Service Delivery. Is this just another inflated moniker describing frivolous development initiatives?

Hardly.

Think about the action being described: delivering health services. Now think about how to do this well. Health services need to be delivered to sick people. So you first need to know who is sick. But that isn’t enough. You need to know who is sick at the precise time that they are sick. The best impact from health services will be gained if these services are delivered to the right people at the right times.

The Challenge

How would you find out who is sick at the precise time that they are sick?

Making it more challenging: you can’t just react to sickness, you have to predict it. Why? Sickness usually requires some sort of cure, like medicine, or better yet, preventative activities. And it takes time to get preventative activities or medicine to the community. Too much time, in fact. The doctor needs to have the medicine in her hands exactly when she finds a sick person. That’s the way disease works. But if you get the medicine to her too early, it will expire and be useless. So you have to predict within a month or so when someone is going to get sick so you can get the medicine to the doctor before the sick person shows up, but not too soon before.

How would you predict when and where sickness will happen?

And here comes the next challenge: the vast majority of countries in this world can’t afford either the doctors, medicines or monitoring systems that would facilitate good health service delivery. It is a challenging problem to solve.

Our Solution

Our experts have made lifelong commitments to answering these questions.

Akros is:

  • Supporting governments to better understand when and where disease happens
  • Supporting governments to build better response systems to deliver medicine and treat sickness
  • Working with Western-based donors to help them understand what works and what doesn’t

Since our teams are all located in the heart of sub-Saharan Africa, we have the privilege of seeing problems and prospective solutions firsthand. We have a first-name relationship with the government officials that Washington D.C. wants to try and help.

This is our world, and these are our solutions.