Innovative solutions for the health sector in Tanzania

After a one-day Focus Group Discussion about health issues, an extra day was added to the event to discuss a systematic way to develop an innovation model to stimulate innovation in the Health sector. Particular attention was paid to methods for problem investigation.   

As Nic Moens, Country Programme Manager, Tanzania explained:

“What is needed for development is the courage to be critical and open to new solutions. That is exactly what we are trying to do by gradually building a safe and conducive environment for this. However, while we can assist in the process aspects of innovation, the content and critical reflection can only be done by the local innovators themselves”.

Essence of the workshop

The essence of the workshop was to show the main stages during the process of creating the right environment to identify innovative solutions: problem analysis and scanning the opportunities; conceptualising the idea; making a business case; and then implementing it, marketing it and evaluating the results. Four different methods were used to accomplish this: Root Cause Analysis; Value Attribute Analysis; Value Engineering; and Value Stream Analysis.

Key areas of reflection

The main issue discussed during the workshop was how the cost of ICT equipment for health management information systems could be radically reduced: the aim was to bring the overall cost down by 50%. Other problems that participants attempted to address during the workshop included how to troubleshoot effectively, and how to guarantee that HMIS systems would not have a down-time of more than one hour a week, maximum.

On a practical note, during the workshop one of the Hospital Administrators present was able to map the way in which patients flowed through her hospital. By doing so, she discovered how – with a few adjustments – she could optimise the time that was lost on this by both the doctors and the patients. Although she had not tried such an exercise before, she was able to master it very quickly and found it ‘extremely helpful’.

In addition to the above, some of the more fundamental innovations that were addressed at the workshop included the use of mobile devices for eLearning and telemedicine in health.

Three key learning points

By the end of the workshop, the participants were able to identify 3 valuable learning points:

•  The importance of good problem analysis.
• The fact that we already know a lot and can easily come up with ideas for innovations
• It is always difficult for people to think outside the box and to wander off the beaten track; letting go and being creative is an immense challenge for most people

Follow-up

The innovation process is ongoing: it did not end with the Mwanza workshop. The idea is to continue with the discussion online using web-enabled tools. That way, the issues can continue to be explored in depth. A website has also been developed specifically for the participants of the workshop. They will use it to develop their innovations further and share ideas.