Project Optimize Rural Health

Improving rural health via capacity building of rural health workers to adequately manage most primary health conditions

Equality and equity in access to quality medicines and healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa remains a challenge. Rural communities are most affected as there is paucity of healthcare infrastructure and human resource. They rely majorly on community health workers and nurses who, many a time, lack the requisite update of knowledge needed to provide optimum care as disease burden continues to rise. This has led to increased regularity in misdiagnosing disease conditions resulting in the misuse of medications, especially antibiotics. Pregnant women, children and mothers do not get adequate services they need to detect conditions that pose significant risk to their health. These problems are further compounded by poor data management practices leading to unreliable, incongruent and incomplete data, thus making it very difficult for decision makers to take the right decisions needed to improve quality of care.  Many healthcare practitioners providing primary healthcare services to rural communities face the reality of paucity of routine supervision and continuing knowledge and practice update required for frontline healthcare workers to confidently and adequately diagnose and treat health conditions and improve rural health. Many rural community dwellers may not be opportune to see a Doctor in their lifetime. Therefore, what can be done to make positive difference and improve quality of care for rural communities?

This project seeks to answer this question by providing solutions and services that can improve the capacity of rural health workers to adequately diagnose and treat most primary health conditions and improve rural health. This project offers solutions that integrate clinical mentoring and primary care outreaches, engaging community health workers, creating community-level groups for specific diseases and forming a local health committee. Multi-disciplinary team of mentors will be formed to cover different types of care provided at the primary healthcare level, and with a guidance tool, periodic visits will be paid to rural clinics where quality assessments on data, service and quality tracking and local staff supportive mentoring on routine consultations and practices will take place. This team will also offer wide-ranging medical outreach and health promotion services to the rural communities during their visits. Roaming community health workers will also be trained, mentored and equipped to provide home care, diagnosis and referrals. Disease-specific community-level groups and local health committees will also be formed and educated to provide a support network to care for each other and to help maintain and mobilize fellow community members to seek quality health services respectively. These should lead to a positive qualitative and quantitative impact on rural healthcare.

Reports suggest that over 63% of sub-Saharan Africans live in rural areas, thus, improving rural access to quality healthcare and medicines will significantly reduce disease burden and mortality. Many technological innovations exist and more are springing up and they have truly improved healthcare delivery. However, changing our processes and improving our strategy and modus operandi can also have significant positive impact since Africa remains resource-limited. Innovations, such as the one proposed, can help rural dwellers seek care sooner and access quality care.

This project is aims at changing processes and approaches and improving existing strategy and modus operandi in healthcare access and delivery in rural communities. Due to resource-limitation in Africa, innovations, such as the one proposed, can help rural dwellers seek care sooner and access quality care.

This solution in itself does not require significant technology to implement at this stage. However, technological components that can improve healthcare worker mentoring and quality monitoring can be incorporated

Our main goal is to improve the capacity of rural healthcare workers in adequately diagnosing and treating most primary health conditions and to help rural dwellers seek care sooner and access quality care.

We hope that at least 3 hard-to-reach rural communities in Nigeria will be positively affected in the next one year

The vision over the next five years is to improve the capacity of rural healthcare workers in at least 3 primary health centers in all 36 states of Nigeria and the Federal Capital Territory. Within this period, we also envisage that we would have built collaborations and scaled this project to at least 5 West African countries and encouraging other countries to adopt the model.

Integrating clinical mentoring and primary care outreaches, engaging community health workers, creating community-level groups for specific diseases and forming a local health committee. Mentors will cover different types of care provided at the primary healthcare level, periodic visits will be paid to rural clinics, wide-ranging medical outreach and health promotion services to the rural communities will be offered, roaming community health workers will be trained, mentored and equipped to provide home care, diagnosis and referrals. Disease-specific community-level groups and local health committees will be formed and educated to provide a support network of care.

This solution is targeted at rural communities with limited access to quality care and is still at the prototype stage

In the next 12 months, we expect that at least 3 hard-to-reach rural communities in Nigeria will be positively affected in terms of access to quality care. 

In the next three years, we expect that majority of all the states in Nigeria will be receiving this service and collaborations on scaling this service to other West African countries would have been initiated

Majority of the team are certified and licensed medical and healthcare professionals with over 18 years combined experience and relevant skills in healthcare delivery and health system strengthening. The team also consist of experts in communication, capacity building and research

This project is designed to be a non-profit. However, we envisage  collaborations with federal and state ministries of health as well as local and international organizations focusing on improving access to quality healthcare and medicines.

We believe that solve can provide us with the necessary technical assistance to fine-tune this project as well as funding to realize the potential for this project

So far, no barriers exist. We are majorly faced with challenge of funding to equip mentors and healthcare workers with the tools and resources needed