I recently finished a book about the history of the National Health Service (NHS), which is the UK’s public health system. It’s consistently ranked as a top-5 health system in the world, employs over 1.5 million people [almost the size of Latvia], and has an annual budget equivalent to half of Nigeria’s GDP. The NHS inspires me because of its founding ideals that everyone deserves access to quality healthcare - and the serious but complicated attempts to make those ideals a reality. Below are a few reflections from the book: 1/ Before the creation of the NHS, access to quality healthcare was low in the UK. Only a subset of working men - who created insurance collectives with their workmates - were able to access formal care. As a result, women died during childbirth at a rate 4x higher than coal miners died from work-related causes. 2/ When the NHS was launched in 1948, it offered all British citizens access to free primary and secondary care, as well as access to low-cost medications. As a result of the NHS’s work, lifespans in the UK increased by 3 years from 1950 to 1960 – alongside more equally distributed access to care, increased quality of care, and lower infant morality. 3/ One of the biggest constraints in any health system, including the NHS, is the labor market: the number of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists available to treat patients. It’s difficult for the government to strike the right balance between labor costs and healthcare access & quality for patients. This balance is even harder in emerging markets with volatile currencies, where part of the health service emigrates when the currency falls. 4/ As a result of the need to treat millions of patients with limited resources, it’s critical to use technology to magnify the patient impact of each GBP or Naira spent on health. For the NHS, this has included rolling out electronic medical record (EMR) systems to hospitals. In Nigeria, Lifestores Healthcare helps healthcare providers accomplish more with less by reducing their medication costs by 10-20% with our procurement platform and increasing their sales by 10% with our mini-ERP systems. 5/ One of the areas where the NHS could improve is that it’s more oriented towards healing sick people than helping people to stay healthy in the first place; estimates vary, but it may only be spending ~5% of its budget on prevention. Unfortunately, most of the world’s health systems follow this approach. By developing the core digital infrastructure needed for healthcare in emerging markets, Lifestores Healthcare is freeing up 25%+ of Nigerian front-line health workers’ time from back-end admin so that it can be redirected to preventative care for patients. https://lnkd.in/eRftuJxS
Viktor Tomenko
5mo
Hello Andrew. Pls check my invitation in Linkedin. We have some common interests in Nigeria. I would like to discuss it.
Well done Andrew, turn it into a PhD. Cheers
Elie Bitar
5mo
Very insightful Andrew! Thanks for sharing
Strategic Partnerships Manager
5moPublic policies have a great influence on healthcare system. We must see the impact of Thatcher's policies since the 1980s on public health in Great Britain. We may even compare theses policies with labor party's ones. Austerity and budget cuts are pronounced liberal choices which have their impact, not only in Great Britain but everywhere else as well. In my opinion, technologies are in some way the pawns that serve the public policies in force, in one direction or another.