A system for better health
It is a well-known and widespread challenge: infrastructure investments in the healthcare sector of developing and emerging countries are often unable to realize their full potential and new acquisitions are sometimes not even used at all. The reasons for this are, for example, inadequate consideration of compatibility with local conditions in the case of new acquisitions. Added to this are inadequate operating and maintenance concepts and insufficient user training.
Considerable potential for improvement can be exploited here through “systemic tenders”, as this means that a systemic project approach or a holistic approach is firmly anchored in the project as early as the award procedure. In a systemic tender – and thus a tender for functional units or systems according to functional criteria or performance criteria – the focus is on the system conversion required for the success of a complex infrastructure investment. This means that the entire operational process of the affected unit or facility is taken into consideration.
The focus here is on the extent to which the operational process can be converted for optimal use of the new technical acquisition and for smooth operation overall, what human and financial resources are required for this and how these can be generated in the long term. Such an approach raises awareness of the extent and importance of the necessary reforms and thus has considerable potential to have a lasting impact on an existing working culture. As a result, this leads to quality improvements in treatment practice and to the benefits of the new acquisition being optimized at patient level.
At the beginning of 2012, the German Healthcare Partnership (GHP, since July 2019: GHA – German Health Alliance) launched the “Dialogue on systemic tendering in the healthcare sector” initiative to tap into the potential of systemic tendering in German development cooperation (DC). This study, commissioned as part of this initiative, addresses specific issues relating to technical cooperation (TC).