Wyman Worldwide Health Partners
Oliver Wyman has launched a pro bono effort to support Comprehensive Community Health Initiatives and Programs (CCHIPs) in Rwanda, a project to create a simple, self-sustaining, and replicable solution for delivering quality primary healthcare in remote communities.
CCHIPs was launched in 2006 by Bill and Ro Wyman of Wyman Worldwide Health Partners (WWHPS), a non-profit organization working at the grassroots level to solve one of Africa's most difficult problems: providing healthcare in remote rural communities. The goal of WWHPS is to build a comprehensive model for the effective and sustainable delivery of basic primary health care—a replicable model that can be implemented across Rwanda’s 400-plus rural health centers.
These health centers serve as mini-hospitals, with 15 to 25 in-patient beds, labor and delivery rooms, laboratory, and pharmacy. Each treats between 15,000 and 40,000 patients a year. Nurses are often high school graduates with little formal medical training and no systems management experience. The CCHIPs model focuses on improving all essential health center operations and ensuring that their staffs are empowered to sustain the improvements. The approach includes
- Improving the staff's medical knowledge and care-giving skills
- Creating efficient and effective financial, medical, pharmacy, and data management systems
- Implementing successful preventative care programs in vaccination, family planning, health and hygiene/sanitation practices, nutrition, and mental health
- Integrating the health center into the community it serves by educating people on health issues and leading training sessions for community health workers, traditional healers, and local authorities
- Addressing the site’s infrastructure issues, including water, electricity, sanitation, and medical equipment
WWHPS first began testing the CCHIPS model with the Shingiro Health Center, in Musanze District of Rwanda's Northern Province, in the spring of 2008; the center subsequently improved from No. 10 to the top-performing center in the district, according to government ratings. CCHIPs was rolled out to a second location, the Kabere Health Center, in January 2010.
The pro bono effort by Oliver Wyman's global Leadership Development practice involves designing and delivering a learning program for the CCHIPs staff, enabling them to train health center staffs and community health workers; developing guides for health centers to use in implementing the new CCHIPs processes; and evaluating the impact of the learning program on health center operations.
To learn more visit http://www.wwhps.org/.
