An article featured in BMJ reports on a ‘white paper’, which investigates as to how India and the UK can collaborate more closely in an equal partnership to improve both nations’ primary health care.

The paper lists a number of opportunities based on India’s plans to achieve Universal Health Coverage, which requires the collaboration of the UK and India to benefit both nations by strengthening primary care in India and bringing expertise and innovations from India to improve care in the UK.

In 2010, the British and Indian prime ministers established the India-UK CEO Forum, which the paper will help to guide in order to assist in raising trade and investment between both nations and also promote a greater collaboration between both countries.

The Forum identified Health as one of the key areas in which both countries should collaborate more closely together. The paper is based on this strategy and enjoys the support of various leading organizations, such as the UK Department for International Development and the Government of India Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

Mala Rao, Professor of International Health from the University of East London and David Mant, Professor of General Practice from Oxford University have defined a strategic analysis that is followed by a series of partnership opportunities:

  • Enhancing the status of primary healthcare in India using the experience of the UK’s Medical and Nursing Councils and the Royal College of General Practitioners
  • Developing public-private partnerships using the experience of the UK National Health Service, which has always commissioned primary care from independent contractors
  • Collaborative training in primary care across health disciplines
  • Collaborative research and development of primary healthcare models, staffing solutions and technologies
  • Helping develop quality standards and governance arrangements for primary care with inputs from organizations, such as the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and the Department for International Development
  • Developing affordable medical technologies that draw on the respective strengths of India in technological innovation and the UK in technological assessment and evaluation

Rao and Mant end with specific suggestions for the Forum, for instance, using UK support for developing primary healthcare models in a small number of Indian states, or by enhancing existing strengths, like India’s current health delivery infrastructure and its world leading generic pharmaceutical industry. These models could subsequently be used to guide expansion across other states. The closer partnership between the Indian and UK government could also lead to a joint exploration of collaborative and commercial opportunities.

Professor Lalit Dandona, Director of the Wellcome Trust Capacity Building Program at the Public Health Foundation of India, and Professor Jagdish Prasad, Director General of Health Services of India’s Government write in a linked editorial that strengthening primary healthcare in India is vital, “because many basic health indicators continue to be poor.”

According to Dandona and Prasad, a UK-India partnership “offers promise if it connects with existing efforts and stakeholders” but say those involved in implementing the proposed activities must keep several issues in mind.

For example, the need to complement existing efforts and to assess the benefits of these activities to society, the need to engage the medical and academic communities as well as private providers and policy makers, and the need to explore commercial opportunities wisely “so that commercial interests do not outweigh the partnership’s goal of working for the public good.”

They also state that the partnership needs to be equal, concluding:

“The Indian and UK parties will have different, probably complementary, skills to offer to the partnership, which if harnessed with mutual respect would have the best chance of successful outcomes.”

Written By Petra Rattue