PharmAccess Foundation, the pioneering SafeCare quality improvement methodology developer, has announced a significant expansion of its efforts to elevate healthcare standards across Nigeria.
By licensing new partners, PharmAccess is set to scale the implementation of SafeCare, a move critical for building trust and ensuring quality within the nation’s healthcare system, especially as health insurance schemes grow.
The announcement was marked by signing a new licensing agreement with Monitor Healthcare, led by Femi Ogunremi, the chief executive officer.According to Njide Ndili, PharmAccess country director, the partnership is a crucial strategy to increase the organisation’s capacity to support hospitals and other key actors in their quality improvement journeys.
Highlighting the pressing need for this expansion, Ndili said: “Over the last decade, PharmAccess has been engaging its staff to do quality improvement in hospitals across Nigeria and across the world. But because of the demand and the need for quality, for example, if you want to implement health insurance, you want to trust your hospital, and you cannot trust the hospital that doesn’t have good quality care.”The SafeCare methodology provides a structured approach to quality, likened to a hotel rating system. “SafeCare is a quality improvement tool from levels one, two, three, four, and five. It’s like your hotel rating system…the higher the star, the better the hospital,” she explained.
The core of the initiative is to address the intensive process of working hand-in-hand with hospitals. “We don’t have enough staff who will go around because they are a very intensive process to walk hand in hand with the hospital to improve the quality of care,” Ndili stated. “So, what we’re doing now is licensing partners who we will train and show them how to use the SafeCare methodology so they can then go out and scale and implement it across facilities.”The ultimate goal of SafeCare is to ensure consistency and predictability in healthcare delivery. By focusing on hospital processes, human resource skills, and appropriate infrastructure and equipment, SafeCare aims to make healthcare outcomes more predictable and ensure a standardised delivery of healthcare services.
PharmAccess has already made significant inroads, having assessed about 2,000 hospitals. SafeCare has already partnered with existing partners like LASHMA, the health insurance agency in Edo State, and the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) in Abuja, while it’s open to new collaborators to drive systemic improvements in healthcare quality across the nation. According to Ibironke Dada, SafeCare’s Director of Quality, the goal is to strengthen quality systems at the provider level, promote the adoption of policy standards and improvements, and drive greater demand for care.
With internationally accredited standards, Dada noted that the quality platform strives to support facilities with data insight and support peer-to-peer engagement.“We are currently in 27 countries and have over 9,000 facilities that we are working with. We have been able to impact the lives of 9.6 million persons utilizing services in those facilities,” she said.
Femi Ogunremi, Monitor Healthcare CEO, explained that partnering with PharmAccess was a significant opportunity for the company to enhance its skills and efficiency. He stated that while the organisation had been training hospitals and care workers on quality-related topics, the collaboration with PharmAccess, specifically using SafeCare standards for quality assessment, would allow them to be “sharper and more efficient” in their work.
Ogunremi elaborated that the SafeCare methodology enables them to assess a hospital, determine its current standing on quality, and identify where it needs to be according to the standards. This process, he noted, allows them to “generate a quality gap.” Consequently, their organization can then “train them specifically on what they need,” making the training more focused and efficient.
