Addressing healthcare’s innovation challenges

We believe that such combined efforts would play a critical role in addressing healthcare challenges and broader market failure.

The health status of the Tanzania population has continued to improve in recent years. This is evidenced by the improvement of the life expectancy at birth. Similarly findings indicate that, child mortality has declined rapidly to 81 per 1000 live births for 2006-2010, and according to projections.

In the same vein it has been reported that government is planning to start funding future researches that will target providing solutions to challenges facing the public in health sector.

The remarks were made this week during a joint press conference by the Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH), the National Institute of Medical Research and the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS) ahead of the forthcoming visit of the director of the United State's national institute of health (NIH) Dr Francis Collins from 31st July to 1st August.

Currently research in the health sector conducted in the country is funded by foreign institutions including NIH, noting that from next year the focus would be to start contributing at least 50 per cent of the research funding.

This will enable us to move away from dependence on foreign institutions to fund research and the institutions will start by contributing 50 per cent of the research funding with the objective of ensuring that research in health sector focus on providing solutions to problems facing the public.

It is no doubt that funding the research will give the government leverage to choose areas that the research will focus on in order to address challenges in the health sector, which is currently not the case because research is funded by foreign institutions.

COSTECH also plans to fund special research that will be conducted by graduates who want to focus on specific areas in the health sector and most especially in diagnostic research.

On its part, MUHAS has been collaborating with NIH in a number of areas including research in areas including HIV/Aids, Malaria, Human Health and DNA.

In 2010 NIH established a new system geared at improving teaching in 12 higher learning institutions in Africa including Tanzania.The improved system of teaching has recorded huge impact in the collaborating institution.

In Tanzania the centre was at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC) with participation of MUHAS and Bugando Catholic University. According to reports MUHAS has benefited a lot from the collaborative researches conducted including in HIV/Aids researches which are still going on.

Some of the achievement recorded include more advanced malaria testing kit and mosquito treated nets for prevention of malaria and efforts were being made in continuing with research on malaria vaccine and Tuberculosis."