HOW KENYA CAN REFLECT SWITZERLAND’S MEDICAL POWER IN AFRICA

When you think about medical giants you probably would think of Germany, USA, most probably India but all these countries don’t even come near to the medical mega which is Switzerland a country which many may not put a lot of attention on on the perspective of medical supremacy.

But many may ask what is the secret recipe of the Switzerland medical superiority. Commonly known as the health valley, Switzerland started prioritizing the need of technology in their medical sector in the early 1970 this is according to the Swiss Med tech. The use of medical technology was a very new innovation back then and many countries didn’t pay much emphasy on it. Since then the medical power of Switzerland has sprinted over the years challenging nations which have more financial prowness than Switzerland.

On a report released on September 25,2018 by a blog site known as Monterail, Switzerland has over 1600 medical companies which are majoring more on medical technology innovations, over 54500 employees which are highly trained and experienced medical personell. It also stated that Switzerland spends more than 2.2% of GDP on medical sector which is one of the highest across the field.

According to the federal health insurance act of Switzerland, it mandated that all residents buy statutory health insurance(SHI) from private insurance companies which has enabled every individual in Switzerland to be insured.

Switzerland also has a strong academia which is majoring on providing quality education, offering world class pharmacy, Biotechnology and medical engineering courses which have shown great results to the young people who have been grown in an healthy oriented environment. Investors have also shown great interest in investing in Switzerland’s med tech which has seen them leap heavy fruits from it.

“It wasn’t a conscious shift. It just sort of happened ,our machining and mechanical engineering skills are driven by innovation and this has laid the foundation for our reputation for quality highly engineered technologies” .This is according to Patrick Dammler the managing director for med tech Switzerland, revealing on how the country became a med tech leader.

On the other side, Kenya which is also amongst countries which are leading in medical supremacy in Africa, is also making strides on improving their medical technology and ensuring that every citizen in the country benefits from it. According to the pan-African medical journal 72.5% of  Kenyans live in the rural areas 19.59% only having medical insurance which is one of the hindering factor of the medical growth.Kenya has showed it’s efforts of improving by having 24.5 units/million of medical equipments majority of them owned privately,while the public sector has 9.6 million units/million which is less than half of the WHO recommendation of 20 units/millions.

According to the health cabinet secretary Susan Nakhumicha the health sector is making efforts to digitalize the NHIF which will greatly boost the healthcare system.