A short video from our visit to one of the last remaining families of mountain gorillas living on a 14,000 foot volcano on the border of Rwanda and Congo.
Partners in Health in Rwanda: What Can We Learn?
I had the opportunity to visit the district health center in Rwinkwavu, Rwanda, where Dr. Michael Rich explained why the Partners in Health model of care is able to achieve better medication adherence in Rwanda than even our best practices in the United States.
It is not just the fact that Bill Clinton and The Clinton Foundation negotiated a deal on antiretroviral (ARV) drugs. It’s not just the fact that the once complex cocktail regimen of pills can be combined into one generic pill. It is because an army of community health workers visit patients in their villages every day, checking in to make sure everything is OK, and to make sure that everyone is taking their medicine.
Daily support and monitoring at home, working with informal caregivers in the community to surface problems early so that bigger problems can be prevented: That is the key to improving quality of care with limited resources.
Dr. Paul Farmer, as chronicled in the book “Mountains Beyond Mountains” by Tracy Kidder, realized this in Haiti a decade ago, and now the Partners in Health “accompagnateur” system is being rolled out in developing countries around the world. Is there something we might learn from Rwanda?