Build trust by localising health services and health product manufacturing with PodTech™
In the bid to achieve universal health coverage, we often speak of the need for better quality healthcare facilities, better trained doctors and nurses, increasing medicine and vaccine supply, and reducing out-of-pocket healthcare expenditures. These factors do, without a doubt, play a significant role in ensuring that people around the world are able to improve their health. Beyond these physical determinants of improved health outcomes, however, are some subtler aspects critical to achieving widespread healthcare access.
Trust, visibility, transparency. These elements, or the lack of them, play a big role in whether and how people access healthcare. Bringing healthcare closer to where people live, involving the community in the production and delivery of medicines, and allowing them to see first-hand how quality health services can improve people’s quality of life is crucial to the mission of universal health coverage.
Learning from Congo’s COSAs.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) recently highlighted the story of how district-level health committees in Congo, referred to as COSAs, transformed how people accessed healthcare.
Only four years ago, in 2021, a meagre 13.82% of Congo’s population had access to health services. Beyond high costs and geographical isolation, a lack of information, misinformation, and a trust deficit held people back from accessing services that would improve their health.
“I didn’t vaccinate my children because I thought it could make them sick, or worse, kill them,” the WHO quotes a mother of three children as saying.
When the country’s Ministry of Health and Population piloted a new programme in 2022, they didn’t anticipate just how it would revolutionise healthcare for common people. Conducted in 12 health districts, the pilot included the creation of more than 70 COSAs, comprising 400 trained members. COSA members raised awareness, combated misinformation, involved communities in the management of health services, and encouraged regular use of health care services.
It is astounding how transformational things as simple as visibility and communication can be. The Congolese people were convinced. From 2021 to 2022 to 2023, the attendance rate at integrated health centres (IHCs) increased from 9% to 57% to 81%. Antenatal consultation rates in the Ouesso district increased from 8% to 41% to 54% in those years. Across the 12 pilot districts, attendance at IHCs rose by 10% on average, encouraging the expansion of the programme to the rest of Congo’s 40 other health districts.
The COSAs involved the community to not only build trust but also enable true co-management of health.
The COSAs have improved healthcare attendance, helped people access free medicines, fought misinformation, and boosted vaccination rates. All these and more benefits have been the result of some targeted actions – localising health delivery has enabled those working in the health system to better understand the needs, constraints and dynamics of the community; the Health Ministry also facilitated capacity building in drug and financial management. Today, common Congolese people can enjoy better quality of care and reception at health facilities.
Bridging the healthcare divide by localising health product manufacturing.
The success story of Congo’s COSAs is a testament to the power of localised health service delivery. It is a testament that people everywhere want what is best for their, their family’s, and their community’s health. It is a testament to the fact that if health systems understand what communities need at a local and regional level, they can much better address these needs to improve health outcomes.
Ultimately, effective health service or product delivery is not a one-way street. It is not a monologue in which health professionals tell communities what is good for them. Rather, it is a dialogue between the health sector and the people they aim to serve; only when healthcare systems understand people’s concerns, unmet needs and specific context can they truly provide the care that any community or region needs.
PodTech™ stands by this spirit of localisation, conversation, and community involvement in the long journey towards global health equity. For this reason, our offering – the modular podule™ technology – is designed to deliver custom, regional solutions to regional problems. How do we do this?
Shorter, localised supply chains. Our prefabricated factory systems and cleanrooms make pharma and biotech manufacturing a reality for regions that have traditionally relied on imports or aid to meet their population’s health needs. By making drug, vaccine and diagnostic manufacturing feasible for these regions, our podule™-based infrastructure shortens supply chains. Not only does this reduce the costs of making medicines etc. but it also brings manufacturing closer to the final consumers of these products – this generates a sense of familiarity and trust which is harder to create when drugs etc. are made in far off regions, with limited control over and visibility into the manufacturing practices, regulatory landscape, and quality assurance mechanisms of that location.
Economic growth and skill development, particularly in rural economies. Setting up a biopharma factory, R&D facility, diagnostic lab, healthcare centre, or patient recovery unit anywhere provides an economic impetus to the area. The installation, operation and maintenance of the facility generates employment opportunities for locals. The presence of biopharma manufacturing also provides impetus to other allied industries like logistics, packaging, excipient manufacturing, research labs, warehousing, cold storage, and beyond. In this way, establishing a prefabricated pharma factory in a region where it isn’t feasible to set up a traditional factory provides a great boost to the economy. Since PodTech™’s factory systems don’t rely much on existing infrastructure, they can also be deployed in resource-scarce rural areas, thereby generating employment, improving infrastructure, and encouraging overall growth in the rural economy.
Better understanding of local needs and context. The diseases that affect LMICs and underserved populations aren’t always of interest to fairly large biopharmaceutical companies for reasons related to scale, customisation, unpredictable market demand, and the like. The greatest power that localised biopharma manufacturing gives countries is control.
When a biopharma factory caters primarily to a regional population, it can adapt easily to changing epidemiological landscapes, market demand, and unmet local health needs. In case of an outbreak, it can easily scale up production with additional podules™ to address the spike in demand for certain health products like, say, antivirals or diagnostics. On the whole, this gives countries more strategic control over what health products are manufactured and available in the market.
All in all, bringing biopharmaceutical manufacturing closer to home inspires confidence in a population that their country has the infrastructure it needs to cater to people’s health needs. It is a matter of health sector resilience and biopharmaceutical self-sufficiency. For governments and enterprising health sector entrepreneurs alike, PodTech™ is the ideal partner to forge a path of strategic autonomy and self-reliance in the health sector. Whether you are in the public sector or private, you can change the world with us, one prefab pharma factory at a time.