Context
Many people in low and middle-income countries still receive inadequate medical care. Worldwide there is a shortage of over 500,000 health care professionals and in many places there is a lack of health services.
This is where hospital partnerships between German institutions and those in low and middle-income countries come in. These programmes enable the exchange of ideas between colleagues in all specialist medical fields in a shared learning environment. Through further education and training partnerships they improve the quality of medical care provided by the health care facilities and universities.
Objective
Hospital partners have developed up-to-date guidelines, new options for diagnosis and treatment and innovative formats for the skilled professionals, and put these into practice.
Approach
The programme supports the hospital partners of German institutions on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Development and Cooperation (BMZ).
It currently provides assistance to more than 560 hospital partnerships in over 70 countries in all specialist medical areas. They receive up to EUR 50,000 in the 'Global' line of funding and up to EUR 200,000 in the 'Academic' line.
The programme supports the projects with on- and offline-formats on the following topics:
• Reporting and financial processing
• International cooperation, results orientation and networking
• Communication
Individual hospital partnerships with high potential for changing the entire national health system will be given extra support.
The community of Hospital Partners is able to take advantage of the global field structure of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. The Else Kröner-Fresenius Foundation provides cofinancing of EUR 9.6 million.