The Nigerian Healthcare System; Channeling The Power of Collaboration

“Patients had a difficult time as the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD)-called nationwide strike entered its second week on Tuesday, with many public hospitals only providing palliative care. Activities and services at these hospitals continued to be delayed. This is the second time in as many months that the association has embarked on a strike...”

The monologue above is the Nigerian #healthcare system in a nutshell. Disheartening, isn’t it?

Introduction

Without placing the health and well-being of populations at the forefront of public policy, we cannot achieve a healthy future. A person's economic prospects are worsened throughout their life cycle by poor health. A person's ability to accumulate human capital is impacted by their health whether they are young children, infants or adults.

Each of us has probably experienced frustration with rigid, impersonal, and bureaucratic care at least once in our lives. Millions of lives are lost and countries incur astronomical costs as a result of these individual experiences adding up to inadequate safety, poor care coordination, and inefficiencies at the system level.?

These negative systems of cycles can develop and might have been impacted by a poor healthcare system that spirals down into these frustrations. In Nigeria, the occasional Doctors’ strike is at the apex of the “frustration pyramid” –a disruptive activity that occasionally leaves serious gaps in the delivery of optimal medical care. But what can be done?

The Case for Collaboration

Working together while providing patient care from a professional perspective is known as interprofessional collaboration. It is now well acknowledged that to enhance and minimize service delivery gaps and provide optimal care for patients with chronic illnesses especially, healthcare professionals must collaborate.?

Certain studies have revealed that collaboration between healthcare companies and #pharmacies is an effective way to improve patient care by helping patients achieve therapeutic goals and enhancing medication management. As this primary care collaboration is effective in improving patient outcomes, community pharmacists and healthcare companies should aim to adopt more collaborative approaches to the delivery of healthcare. This primary care collaboration can be exploited maximally to bridge the gap in healthcare delivery that has been created by occasional crippling Doctors' strikes.

It is noteworthy to state that; nationally and internationally, the profession has made calls for the inclusion of community pharmacies in primary care systems. This urge seems to have been further fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Case for Pharmacies

In Nigeria, doctors, nurses, and patients frequently get their drug information from pharmacists who specialize in medication. In the past, a pharmacist's main responsibilities included dispensing, distributing, and supplying medications and other health products, with little to no interaction with other medical professionals.?

The Nigerian pharmacist's role is, however, broadening and evolving to include patient-oriented (clinical) functions as a result of the population's increasing healthcare needs. Pharmacists currently work in Nigeria and other nations of the world in patient-focused, administrative, and public health roles. These roles include counseling, education, preventive care, health screening, and advocacy, among others.?

By actively participating in direct patient care and working with other healthcare professionals, pharmacists can ensure the rational and economical use of medications, encourage healthy living, and enhance clinical outcomes. As a result of their growing range of practice, pharmacists are now being acknowledged on a global scale for contributing to multidisciplinary healthcare teams and offering the best possible patient care.?

This has been made possible by the recent advent of healthcare companies like #Chekker, who are committed to digitalizing laboratory test procedures to ease patient’s access to healthcare, help pharmacies retain their customers, and also provide comfortable consultation with doctors through their connection with tele-health companies.

The majority of towns in the country have pharmacies, and patients engage with their pharmacists more frequently than they do with their doctors, making pharmacists well-suited to provide these services.

Bridging the Healthcare Gap

Leaders in public health and pharmacy need to create more alliances that advance the objectives of both fields and make the most of their respective advantages. The objective should now be for pharmacies and other healthcare providers and agencies to work together to adopt measures to enhance sustainable health outcomes.?

There are many examples of public health organizations working with pharmacists to deliver their programs at the federal, state, and local levels. In certain parts of the world, this collaboration has registered astounding success; Healthcare companies' and Community pharmacists' competence to safely deliver latent tuberculosis therapy was demonstrated through cooperation between the New Mexico Department of Health, community pharmacies, and other healthcare companies with a satisfactory completion rate of 75.0%.

So, who cares about the occasional Doctors' strikes? Ermm…sick patients, terminally ill patients –basically everybody who requires medical attention. However, these interruptive strikes shouldn’t define the medical state of a whole nation, especially when other healthcare practitioners could bridge this gap.?

Through improved coordination, the health care system—including pharmacy and public health—can improve population health. To take advantage of this potential, relationships must be reinforced, obstacles must be removed, and pharmacists and healthcare companies can be more thoroughly incorporated into community health need assessments, disease surveillance, and health outcome monitoring. In addition, opportunities to make these contributions, evaluate them, and then publicly report on them ought to be sought out more aggressively.

Collaborations between pharmacists and others need to be used more effectively in the public health infrastructure's disease surveillance, monitoring of health outcomes, and assessments of community health needs. It will be necessary to change the types of data that pharmacists can access and contribute to strengthening the infrastructure. Community pharmacies today operate without access to patient information.?

The boundaries separating community pharmacies from the larger public health and healthcare systems must be removed, and pharmacies must be included in health information exchange and surveillance systems.

What is to be gained?

Improvements in population health outcomes in response to interventions are increasingly used to gauge the success of healthcare initiatives instead of the number of services provided. In this new environment, vertical cooperation is essential, and the pharmacy profession is a frequently ignored partner. But what exactly is to be gained?

By improving the likelihood of incorporating pharmaceutical policies, goods, and services as effectively as possible into the holistic health system thinking, the integration of community pharmacy into the primary care health system would lessen the fragmentation of patient care procedures. The financial benefits of utilizing a well-established healthcare resource, like the current community pharmacy network, would help ensure the long-term viability of the healthcare system.

Patients do not need to suffer healthwise if the hospitals are on strike. With healthcare companies like Chekker, they can get affordable healthcare without the stress of queuing at laboratories, or getting stuck in traffic on their way to the hospital when they walk into the pharmacy closest to them.?

While this is a deviation from the doctor-patient-pharmacist triangle; the new triangle; patient-laboratories-health-tech companies is nothing short of promising. This is obvious in Chekker’s data of collaborating with over 5000 pharmacies across Lagos, reaching over 20,000 Nigerians and bringing the healthcare system to speed despite the concurrent hiccups in the industry.

Bottom Line

At this point, I would say that it would be advantageous to further integrate #pharmacies and #healthcare companies into the larger primary healthcare system, make progress in improving the training, and accelerate funding for #healthtech startups facilitating this innovation. Apart from the fact that shortages of and demand for health workers are concentrated in developing countries like those in Africa, the World Health Organisation, WHO predicts that by 2030, more than 18 million additional health workers will be required to meet the Sustainable Development Goals and Universal Health Coverage targets.