Building public-private partnerships for better access to health products

Friday, October 18, 2013

Improving health outcomes for the most vulnerable people requires global funding and collaboration – but neither will have an impact without effective systems for delivering health products and care.

Strong supply chains, while critical for improving lives, are rarely the focus of programmes that aim to achieve the millennium development goals or end deaths from preventable disease. As World Health Organisation director-general Dr. Margaret Chan has said, “All the donated drugs in the world won’t do any good without an infrastructure for their delivery.”

Among the multitude of interventions available, public-private partnerships (PPPs) can be a lifeline for improving inefficient and under-resourced health systems. A country’s wider health system and supply chain can benefit from private sector lessons, and governments can capitalise on the skills of the private sector to strengthen parts of the health system for which public officials lack the expertise to be effective.

Private sector input can transform systems plagued by stock-outs, expired medicines and unreliable delivery into organised and demand-led operations that save lives – but success comes only if the most appropriate PPP model is implemented.

Source: The Guardian (link opens in a new window)

Categories
Health Care
Tags
public health, public-private partnerships