Africa Entrepreneurs, Success Studies, 2011-2015 (July 2015, EPP Books eppbookservices Ghana) Chapters 8, Kenya research is as follows (1186 words): Health Services (7): The Avenue Group of Healthcare Providers, main offices in Nairobi, offers affordable, quality health services, with facilities countrywide. It consists of: (1) Avenue Hospital, a 65 bed hospital built in 1976 in Parklands, Nairobi; (2) Avenue Healthcare, started in 1995, manages outpatient clinics in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Thika, Nakuru and Eldoret and offers Managed Care Packages to corporates and families; (3) Avenue Rescue provides Ambulance Services, Emergency Medical Technician courses certified by the Kenya Council of Emergency Medical Technicians, and DIT certified First Aid and Emergency courses; (4) Avenue Homecare specializes in the provision of patient attendants under supervision of qualified nurses at home, medical equipment rental and Patient Attendant training. Insurers have spotted an opening for no-frills but life-saving private health care in Africa. Sitting in the shade outside the Avenue hospital in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, Stephen Ombedho plays on his smart phone while his wife is inside being treated for a chest infection. After three years of private health insurance, he is still getting used to the perk. But he remembers the wait at public hospitals, where the queuing can be measured in days. The 38-year-old driver and his family are covered by his employer, a dairy firm, at a cost of about US$200 a year. The package does not offer much in the way of frills. The wooden waiting area in the hospital car park is little better than a shed. But the care on offer is markedly better than in most of its state-run counterparts. A friend of Ombedho died in 2012 only hours after being discharged from one of them. The doctors, he said, had “no time or money” to give his friend proper treatment. Until recently Kenya was typical of most of sub-Saharan Africa in having, in effect, a two-tier health system. At the top end, the rich generally went to one of two exclusive private hospitals, while the poor majority had to put themselves at the mercy of an often dysfunctional state sector. That has left a huge gap in the middle, says Diana Patel, who heads Avenue Group, which runs small private hospitals and outpatient clinics. As soon as they started to fill that gap, we’ve been overflowing she says. Patel immigrated to Kenya from the United States in 1987 shortly after completing her Masters Degree in Economics at the University of California. She joined Avenue Nursing Home in 1990 as the Administrator, and focused on improving services, efficiency and expanding bed capacity. Patel’s initiative led to the Hospital Status award by the Ministry of Health in 1996. Patel founded Avenue Home Nursing Ltd. now Avenue Homecare, to provide affordable nurse aid / patient attendant services to patients in the comfort of their own homes. Patel is a firm believer in Avenues Motto Respect, Service & Excellence and actively participates and organizes community projects the most recent being Avenue Healthcares much publicized Kisumu Caravan in which 10,000 needy members of the public were given free medical treatment and medication at various Railway Stations between Nairobi and Kisumu during five camps sponsored by a large number of corporate organizations. She was actively involved in the “Kenya Express” series of Medical camps held in March 2004 during which 26,000 needy Kenyans received care and another 30 received free surgery under the Continuing care programme. Patel has been instrumental in educating the general public that the underlying disease in this county is poverty and has had a number of her hard-hitting factual articles on this issue published in the local dailies. East Africa’s improved investment climate persuaded the group to expand. Since 2000, Avenue doubled its number of outpatient clinics to 13 by November 2013; earlier in 2013 it opened a second 70-bed hospital in Kisumu, western Kenya’s largest city. By 2016, it aims to open similar-sized hospitals in neighbouring Uganda and Tanzania. In 2011 a London-based firm, Aureos Capital, later bought out by one of the Middle East’s biggest private-equity firms, the Dubai-based Abraaj Group, invested US$2.5m in the Avenue Group. Shakir Merali, a fund manager with Abraaj, sees it as part of a future pan-African network of affordable private health-care providers meeting an unmet demand for a need that is recession-proof. By 2016 the market for health care in sub-Saharan Africa will be worth US$35 billion, according to a report by McKinsey, a consultancy. But a skills shortage is constraining it, since the continent is reckoned to host a quarter of the world’s disease burden but has only 3% of its medical workers. The World Bank reckons an additional 90,000 doctors and 500,000 nurses will be needed 2016. It is even harder to see how people can pay for health insurance, especially since few Kenyans work in the formal sector, where they might build up a fund. By November 2013, some 600,000 Kenyans out of 43 million were estimated to have bought policies or been given workplace insurance. Half of Africa’s health expenditure is thought to come from out-of-pocket payments, known to health-care pundits as OOPs, with the sick paying over the counter. In Kenya OOPs account for US$77 out of every US$100 spent on private health care, says the World Bank. Millions of people are pushed into a poverty trap by a sudden health crisis. Moreover, the cash economy has been a breeding ground for quacks, counterfeit medicines and unlicensed dispensaries whose owners play hide-and-seek with sparse health inspectors. The only sensible system, argues Onno Schellekens, who runs the Investment Fund for Health in Africa, a private-equity fund based in the Netherlands and Mauritius, is pre-paid private health insurance. Most Kenyans already agree informally among friends and relations to pool medical costs in times of need. Schellekens’s fund began work in September 2013 with Safaricom, Kenya’s leading telecoms company, which pioneered a hugely successful mobile money system, M-Pesa. PharmAccess, a Dutch foundation that aims to bring affordable health care to Africa, is running three pilot schemes that formalise this pooling of risk. It hopes to find the right mix of price and product to persuade people at the market’s bottom end to buy in. Telecoms have proved that Africans will pre-pay for a service that works, says Schellekens. In November 2013, Safaricom also offered health cover with a local insurer, Britam. Its Linda Jamii (Protect the Family) plan provided basic inpatient and outpatient annual cover for two parents and an unlimited number of children for US$140 a year. Sven Byl, who works on health care in Africa for KPMG, a consultancy, predicts that private equity will remake health care for the continent. Some international donors and health-care experts, ideologically attached to the well-endowed systems they are used to at home, resist the onset of private health care for the new middle class. But a decent free system for everyone is not yet affordable. The World Health Organisation reckons a basic system costs US$34-40 per head. Kenya currently spends US$11, at the latest count, in 2011. African governments, Byl argues, should not waste time copying unaffordable models from the West. Source: avenuehealthcare, “Private health care in Africa, A middle way”, economist. 16 Nov 2013, p. 54.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Nov 2013 23:21:47 +0000
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