The role of South-North partnerships in promoting shared learning and knowledge transfer
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COMMENTARY
Open Access
The role of South-North partnerships in promoting shared learning and knowledge transfer Lopa Basu1,2*, Peter Pronovost3, Nancy Edwards Molello2, Shamsuzzoha B. Syed4 and Albert W. Wu3
Abstract While it is clear that hospitals in developing countries need to improve quality of health services and improve patient safety, hospitals in high resource countries need to do the same. Most often the focus on improvement through institutional health partnerships involves hospital teams from high resource settings attempting to aid and teach hospital staff in low resource settings, particularly in Africa. However these efforts to provide assistance may be more satisfying and sustainable if we understand that partnership learning is bi-directional whereby hospital teams from high resource settings also benefit. One particular partnership-based model that demonstrates this benefit to high resource partners is the World Health Organization African Partnerships for Patient Safety (APPS). Johns Hopkins Medicine Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety & Quality (AI) through the APPS model has co-created twinning partnerships with hospitals in Uganda, South Sudan & Liberia. This commentary aims to deconstruct specific learnings that have benefited the Johns Hopkins AI community through the APPS partnership. Keywords: Reverse innovation, Partnerships, Patient safety, Learning
Background Patient safety lessons too often focus on what highincome health systems have often done to inform and guide low-income health systems. However, there is growing evidence that practical and simple approaches to deliver people-centered care to improve the quality of healthcare elicited from low-income countries which have not been fully explored by high-income countries, a process called ‘reverse innovation’ [1, 2] needs further examination. Interest in this field is increasing in global health dialogues and building a growing global pool of knowledge [3] is a critical next step towards unpacking the specific opportunities for South-North learning. Global innovation flow To fully realize the potential for effective flow of innovations, healthcare providers from low and high-income countries need to create trusting, mutually respectful * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 World Health Organization Service Delivery & Safety Department, 750 East Pratt Street, 15th floor, Baltimore, MD 21202, USA 2 Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety & Quality, 750 East Pratt Street, 15th floor, Baltimore, MD 21202, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
relationships and develop structures and processes to support peer learning. The World Health Organization (WHO) is doing this through its African Partnerships for Patient Safety (APPS) (http://www.who.int/patientsafety/implementation/apps/en/), a program that highlights the importance of human interaction through site visits, joint trainings, bi-directional learning and codevelopment of new innovations. One example of an APPS partnership is between the Johns
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