Last Updated on

October 5th, 2023 05:11 am

The partnerships contribution towards reverse knowledge innovation is indispensable in global health and development, without them, the global community would have failed to fully acclimate to its ever emerging health dynamics.

Reversal Knowledge Innovation refers to the flow of ideas through innovations and inventions from emerging or developing Low Income Nations (LIN) in the global south to more developed High Income Nations (HIN) in global north.

There is a steadfast growing inquisitiveness in applying this concept to the modern contemporary healthcare advancement through partnerships as a modernism approach to transform health systems, however there is still a vacuum in the process due to the exclusion of the Para-health professionals or Community Health Workers (CHW) as the grass-root key players in the health service delivery.

Different health schools-of-thought, academic spaces and innovators especially in the clinical medicine advancements have come up with phenomenal ideas and frameworks to improve and come up with new stages of reverse innovation to accelerate global health development process. However the key players who are the CHWs at the very last bottom of the process have always been clustered out of the process equation. Therefore, this paper establishes a new concept model that involves incorporation of the CHWs in the reverse technology and this is termed as Retroversion Transformation Approach (RTA). It is RTA because this is a backward linkage that diffuses in the key last players at the bottom of the process.

Health inventions through reverse knowledge have grown strong in emerging economies mainly because of the support of health philanthropic foundations’ and muilti-country charities’ interconnected support funding, which has been an enabling factor in innovations through financial grants to the innovators. This is an enhancer for reverse knowledge to evolve overtime through better dimensions of quality and quantity of vaccines, clinical trials, drugs, foods and public-health. However, a lot more is needed to advance the reverse knowledge Innovation to secure sustainability of partnerships through a proposed Retroversion Transformation Approach (RTA) with the inclusion of the Community Health Workers’ reflection as discoursed hereunder.

The process of RTA has been applied in emerging economies like India, China in inventing new medicines and generic drugs. However due to the less priority given to the African states in the development of new medicines, the incorporation of CHWs has been brushed aside. Usually the test of medicines in invention process is done directly by pharmaceutical corporations through medics, and medics later test the invented drugs on populations.

This paper focuses on the role of CHWs in RTA as paraprofessionals in the model, this is because they’ve an in-depth understanding of the communities in which they serve and therefore, their inclusion will be the best possible way to respond efficiently to the Africa’s health needs, which helps to dispense culturally-appropriate health findings to research thus supporting new solutions to health through identifying society’ most pressing health needs through their experiences and direct social interactions with the communities.

The above Chart flow is built basing  basing on the following steps,

i)  Detecting the critical health area of concern through the CHW’s observations and direct social interaction with the communities.

ii)  Idea development and innovation based on pragmatic reflection experiences of the CHWs in the communities they serve.

iii) Pharmacists’ and medics’ idea assessment through CHWs’ sampling and ground reflection in the communities under focus.

Arch-over to global-north through strategic partnerships, this involves inclusion of pharmaceutical companies in the developed global north hemispheres to further improve the inventions and innovations that have been initiated by primary originators.

Concept-advancement. This is the last stage that encompasses full development of the ideas into practical and applicable solutions to health through thorough analysis and examination of the concepts. This also involves sampling of the solutions that have been realized from ideas, like use of clinical trials by pharmaceuticals for the medicines that have been invented.

In conclusion, as aforementioned, the chronologically stated five-phases in RTA are achievable through strategic multi-stakeholder engagements with in-ward looking CHWs’ involvement and forward-looking health-care innovators, health practitioners, policymakers, health system leaders, researchers,  intergovernmental-organizations, foundations and entrepreneurs such as multi-national pharmaceutical corporations to hasten the movement of solutions through health innovation as a bridleway to strengthen partnerships’ sustainability.

Translate »