Quality assurance for Health Education and Aftercare with tech solutions for Africa

We are working with boundaries that should not exist. Tech has broken many boundaries except in health education where regulations triumph over best practise. 

We are working to solve the problem of quality assurance in the Care segment of healthcare. We are currently training and skilling the youth(18-25yrs) in caregiving. Where they provide aftercare to a wide range of patients from Elderly to post hospital to palliative and everyone in between. The demand for these caregivers and aftercare services has never been more necessary than post covid19. Where taking hospitals to home and keeping patients in hospitals for as minimum time as possible. Sub Saharan Africa has the lowest bed capacity to patient ratio of 1bed to 11 patients. Worldwide statistics are 1bed to 3 patients.

We are currently training 3000 caregivers per year with in-class theory, practicals, and hospital internships with 3 branches across Kenya. Our targets are to train 50,000 by 2026. To achieve this scale, we must embark on long-term technological solutions especially when it comes to quality of training. We also believe that a properly trained caregiver will achieve very good outcomes when delivering aftercare services in homes and post hospital settings.

We also see that Nurses are trained in AFRICA using outdated methods, skill labs and internships that go for way too long and learning is always compromised to due the large numbers being trained at Govt. institutions.

What we have seen as a certified nurse is a very basic nurse who got to practice real life situations at a maximum of once per week and rest of the time was spend in shadowing working nurses and doctors. These are not work ready nurses once they graduate. This automatically leads to poor patient outcomes, and which leads to strain on hospitals bed management and aftercare services.

As we have all learnt, starting at the root cause of any problem solves 99% of the problems. Here we see quality training and teachings as our root cause that is leading AFRICA to a poorer healthcare system with a huge number of human resources but of poor quality. 

 Our Solution

Africa without boundaries. Health education in Africa is bound by individuals and boundaries. Immense regulation but outdated and not aligned with the fast-moving pace of the world. Our solutions can bring best practice training skills through tech with a localized learning approach

We want to incorporate Ai, Tech, Multiverse/Virtual worlds in training and using similar tool kits while providing healthcare services.

How we envision our solutions to work:

Training: We believe we can train the theory elements via online methods and tools. The practical elements is where our solutions come to shine. We can set up physical immersive rooms across Kenya and Sub Saharan Africa which will be manned by Technology or admin staff and not specialized human resources. These rooms will be equipped with fully immersive tech combined with high-definition mannequins. The scenarios played out in the immersive rooms will relate to modules chosen to practice and the mannequin be integrated with the immersive tech.

This solution can work for entry level healthcare to nursing to specialized nursing and even have doctors come to practice certain procedures. We have mannequins available for all types of practice and we can combine these with real world scenarios in our immersive rooms, will make any trainee improve their skills by a 100% if not more.

Aftercare: With the rise of wearables for almost any condition, we are thinking of scale of aftercare services. With our immersive room technology and multiverse/virtual world technology, real life scenarios and predictions can be offered with Ai as a main tool linking the wearables to our software. Our healthcare workers can purchase a wearables kit for their clients, sell or lease the same to their clients and offer physical services while we do the rest to provide them with real time solutions and actions to ensure patient outcomes are super positive and proactive. 

Our Solutions are meant to solve almost all health outcomes in Africa. Yes, it’s a large goal but we can do it.

With the emergence of starlink and similar, we can put up an immersive room in almost all regions of AFRICA where previously would not have been imaginable. We don’t need skilled resources to manage skill labs and labs can be run remotely through main hubs. This means we are without boundaries and the best skill practice can be taught and examined to someone in the middle of Kenya or Congo by the best in practice nurse/Dr from USA or Japan or wherever they may be located.

We are solving root cause problems where for example a hip fracture management can be taught to a caregiver who only has the basics for daily activities. A nurse can learn best ways to inject, suture or similar in the middle of a desert. We can do so much for the population of Africa that can result in super positive outcomes at their local areas instead of coming to cities and towns for basic health needs. 

Our team is a very diverse blend of professionals. We have a medical director, 18 nurses , and a vast variety of support staff from it to admin. Our dean for training is also a Phd in IT. Our business operates from 4 different cities in Kenya and has over 40 partnerships with hospitals accross Kenya. We envison opening our 5 th branch first half of 2024 and our first international branch in Kampala by second half of 2024. We are closer to a lot of marginalised communities, especially since we train youth who could not get into higher education and our female to male ratio is 10 : 1 

At the same time, our step down facility and homecare services interact with patients from all backgrounds on a daily basis. 

Lastly, we are a training and vocational educational certified institute. Our idea aligns directly with a TVETA institute and mandates such as providing on hands training and skills for workplace readineness. 

We are at a concept stage as we have achieved the following and have observed the following based on our 5 years in training.

1 – We have for the past 2 years done practical assessments via video call with nurses in India using mannequins and has worked very well. Based on this we have seen that virtual assessments work well. We now need to scale these assessments and having a room and mannequins preset with points and scores, we can assess 100’s at a time.

2 – Based on our interactions with nurses and our own staff nurses, anyone trained in the early 2000’s at a government institution did not have access to mannequins. They trained with fruits and other items. Following these trainings we have seen the same nurses go through online CMES and such and practice nursing with live patients without fully going through real life scenarios in training. This forms a bulk of Kenya’s most experienced nurses.

3 – Doctors and Surgeons have trained in universities based out of Kenya have gotten good exposure to training tools and methods. These specialists are far and few in-between and their CME’s are generally online or in person based on new tools of trade and not necessarily practice or training on the same.

4 – A commercial model using a ready made solution of immersive room technology in the UAE , We have deduced that our markets can afford and pay for such trainings and certifications. 

Solve will help us SOLVE quality assurance in Healthcare training.

We are looking for support in the following areas:

1 – Technical support – While there are ready made solutions for immersive rooms, especially in hardware, software still needs to be designed. We don’t have the capacity to develop this software yet and solve can definitely help us with this.

2 – Partnerships – being part of Solve will get us the spotlight we need to attract the best in training to support us in certification and examination of our trainees using the new tech. We can have the best nurse trainers, healthcare professionals and health experts support us in solving this problem.

3 – Scale – When we are part of a larger group, we can scale much faster and easier when we know we can seek support from a group of people who have seen it and done it. 

Our Solution can CHANGE the way health care is taught and viewed in Africa. We have pitched our solution for the first few cadres of health but the solution can be used in such a broad sense that includes all the below. Africa can be a solution for its health burden and not rely on the world to help solve its health issues. We can help ourselves. 

Our Solutions can be so broad as below:

1 – Caregivers education, certification

2 – Nurses certification and assessments

3 – Drs and Specialists assessments

4 – Maternity specialist assessments

5 – Bio waste scenarios and assessments

6 – Mortuary technicians’ assessments

7 – Chemo and renal Scenarios and assessments

8 – Patient education – Scenarios of what surgeries, chemo, dialysis will look and feel like

9 – New disease/conditions scenarios and trainings immediately instead of waiting to travel and learn more

10 – Childcare Specialists training and certification

A byproduct of using immersive tech and high-definition mannequins is that, the trainees instantly bring back to workplace the use of technology. Technology in healthcare is becoming a fast need and Africa sorely lacks behind. Our solution can boost this by having the workforce bring tech to the workplace instead of the workplace bringing tech to them. 

Our theory of change is evident from our current programs.

We are an accessible and affordable training institute that accepts almost all high school leavers and adults who could not afford or qualify for higher education. Our course certifies them as professionals, exposes them to hospitals as interns, and then transition to work. Having transitioned to work, they are in a position to offer affordable low cost care services to the market which makes a huge impact in at home care and patient outcomes in revoery at home

These three steps make a huge change and difference in an individual’s life.

Theory of change – all hope lost post high school to having hope as a certified professional

                                        Income at almost $0 to almost immediate work placement with entry level salary of $240 per month.

                                       Patient outcomes – having accessible caregivers at lower cost means recovery for at home patients becomes quicker and easier.

                                      Client outcomes – Having an affordable caregiver at home allows fo clients to go back to routine which includes work and less sacrifices made to care for patients at home and overall impact is a net positive on finances.

                                     Patient Outcomes in Hospitals – Properly trained nurses and doctors who have gone through multiple simulations can manage patients better and reduce patient stays in hospitals by 40-60%. This leads to net positives for clients, insurance companies, among others. 

Impact goals

UNSDG goals

Goal4 – Quality Education

Target – 4.3 Indicator – Participation of youth and adults in quality technical vocational training.

Target – 4.4 Indicator - Proportion of youth and adults with information and communications technology (ICT) skills, by type of skill

Target - 4.c Indicator - Proportion of teachers with the minimum required qualifications, by education level

Goal5 – Gender Equality

Target- 5.4 Indicator - Proportion of time spent on unpaid domestic and care work, by sex, age and location.

Goal8 – Decent work and Economic Growth

Target -8.6 Indicator – Reduction of Proportion of youth (aged 15-24 years) not in education, employment or training

Our technology is a combination of both worlds old and new. 

Our centres will primarily be in brick and mortar offices, where we will incorporate immersive tech, virtual reality and AI to provide a truly real gamification of the scenario chosen to certifcation and practise. We will also use high definition manniquins to connect to the same tech for hands on training. 

This combination will provide as real as it can get practical and on hands training as possible. 

Full Time Staff - 22 

Part time - 5 

Tech Consultants - 4

We have been team testing it since 2023

Jinit Shah - Ceo - 2Years ( Mapping and business model - 2022) 

Team - 1Year - Designing and testing , testing go to market 

We are all about diversity and inclusivity. 

Our Full time and contracted workforce is 95% women. 

2% are youth graduated from our own programs. 

We are fully owned by 100% Kenyan citizens. 

Our teams are also represented well with all the major tribes of Kenya. 

Business Model is attached. 

We are financially sustainable. Our training and certification is currently profitable and covering all expenses and costs. Immersive rooms will have to be initially funded via raising capital or grants but operations and day to day costs will also be covered through sales. 

We are currently pitching to health funds such as Villgrow Africa, Boeringher Ingram Impact fund for Africa among others to raise a capital amount of 2.5m$