Strengthening healthcare capabilities
The availability of medicines is not always the primary challenge. Access to healthcare also depends on having a functional healthcare system and the right allocation of resources to make sure that medicines are used appropriately as part of overall health management. For people in communities with limited healthcare infrastructure we partner with others to help strengthen healthcare frameworks and capabilities.
We have defined some common criteria to guide our commitment and ensure that all our partnerships centre on delivering meaningful and enduring benefit. The key principles are that our partnerships:
- lead to positive, measurable outcomes in underserved communities
- can be scaled up and potentially replicated to improve outcomes for a greater number of people
- deliver a sustainable framework that can ultimately be owned and managed locally, without the need for our support.
Such partnerships can also contribute to our business development, by enabling us to understand better the health needs of, and build important relationships in markets of the future.
Some examples of our work
Faced with the huge challenge of communicable diseases like HIV and TB, South Africa has had few resources to devote to breast cancer. Yet it’s the most common cancer among women and, it’s on the increase. Every year, 1 in 29 women in South Africa will be diagnosed with the disease. Many more go undiagnosed and a lot of women are unable to afford or access treatment. To help meet this challenge, without putting strain on an already overburdened public health service, AstraZeneca has created a programme called Phakamisa.
Our AstraZeneca Young Health Programme (YHP) is designed to help young people in need around the world deal with the health issues they face so they can improve their chances of living a better life. We are working with expert partners, Plan International and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, to identify the needs in our local communities and to help address these needs with a combination of work on the ground, research and advocacy. Adolescent health remains an underserved part of the healthcare agenda and this global investment initiative aims to make a measurable and sustainable difference. YHP initiatives are now in place in nine countries and our target is 15 by the end of 2012. By 2015, YHP will reach 500,000 young people between the ages of 10 and 24 directly and will touch an additional 500,000 lives indirectly.
AstraZeneca and the British Red Cross have been in partnership since 2002 tackling TB and TB/HIV in Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan and, more recently, in South Africa, Lesotho and Liberia.
In 2007, AstraZeneca and the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) began a five-year partnership in Uganda to develop an integrated model for the management of malaria, HIV/AIDS and TB, the leading causes of ill health and death in the country.