Discussion about entry: Sustainable Delivery of Essential Healthcare through Micro-franchising
This is discussion about Sustainable Delivery of Essential Healthcare through Micro-franchising.
This is discussion about Sustainable Delivery of Essential Healthcare through Micro-franchising.
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It is true that most rural community in kenya people die from simple curable deseases, to prevent and assist this communties is to provide healthcare of micro- franching for everyone to reach.
Exelente
Great work!
Very good work. Keep it going, as this kind of concepts need sustained efforts and dedication..
Dear Liza: I really enjoyed reading about your project and was happy to see that it was selected as one of the finalists. I?m a member of the Changemakers online review team, and I have a few questions I wanted to ask, in order to get some discussion going: 1. Key Innovation: Do you consider your major innovation to be the fact that you are using franchising to provide health care to low income families, or the way that you are using franchising to provide this care? 2. Financial Sustainability: What exactly do you mean when you say ?earned income is 8% of operating costs? (Section 10) Are you saying that you have profits of 8% or that you are only covering 8% of your operating costs from sales? If the latter, do you cover the remaining 92% from donor funds, or do you have other sources of funding, and do you have any plans to lower this percentage? If so, how? 3. Timeline: Could you tell us a little bit about your timeline? If SHEF began operating in Kenya in 1999, and you now have now have 65 CFW outlets, that means that you opened 65 outlets over 7 years. Will it really be possible to open 135 new outlets over the next two years and 300 more during the following four? What are the implications of such a rapid expansion for your organization in terms of management structure, finding appropriate personnel, maintaining quality control, etc.? 4. Metrics: do you collect any data beyond profitability? Is there any evidence of improved health outcomes in areas served by your clinics? 5. Rewards: You mention that rewards for franchisees extend beyond basic monetary remuneration. Could you elaborate on that? Do you make any provisions for serving clients who cannot afford your services? Best wishes, Judy Deane
Thank you all for your encouragement and support. In response to Judy's queries: 1. Innovation - we consider our innovation to be the use of the franchising model (a business model associated with for-profit motives) for sustainable delivery of essential healthcare to low-income families. This model has the potential to be used in sustainable delivery of many different social benefits to populations in a similar way e.g. with water, technical training, sanitation etc. 2. Costs - Today we are sourcing over 90% of our overhead from donors, however, we have plans to reduce this to about 50% in the next three years and continuously reduce our dependence on donors to negligible amounts thereafter. 3. Timeline - Development of the franchise model has involved a great deal of learning, both at the organisational level and in the supportive supervision provided at field office level. Our franchisee selection, training modules and logistics systems have also gone through various revisions as we strived to standardise and improve systems to their current levels. While these refinements were being made to the franchise model, we laid less emphasis on opening of new outlets so as to test improved systems with lower numbers. By the end of this year, all systems will be fully documented and standardised, and all organisation resources can be focussed on opening of outlets. Our expansion plans are ambitious, but we consider that the organisation infrastructure is in place to support more aggressive expansion, thus improving total sales and returns on our way to sustainability. Please note that our plans will be to open an additional 200 or so outlets in the next three years. The 300 figure is that for the total number of outlets open over the period - it is not incremental. 4. Metrics - We collect other metrics related to number of patients treated, treatments provided per outlet, average cost per treatment, operating costs vs patients treated, stock availability at outlets and warehouses. We are working with partners to measure improved access to essential drugs in the CFWshops areas, which will lead to some analysis of improved health outcomes. However, no published data is available at the moment. 5. Rewards - Our healthworkers (nurses) are professionally qualified and could easily earn a living serving higher income populations. They choose to stay in rural villages due to other benefits and incentives of business ownership, community recognition, appreciation and status. We support provision of treatment to those who genuinely cannot pay through a charity fund in the organisation. Franchisees make the determination of the needy cases, and get reimbursed for the cost of care. This reimbursement is capped and limited to no more than 10% of their monthly sales so as not to undermine the business model.
Excellent work done. We support you fully as a model recognising the basic human needs!!!
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