RT: How do you feel about the GOI’s efforts in increasing the number of trained health professionals?
SJ: In terms of building capacity, they can send some of the doctors or executives for short term training, which is not bad approach for capacity building anywhere in the world. So this is an area for the private sector to work with the govt. you can provide short training programs which can be conducted in country or out of the country.
The second area, which I think is more important is the skilled physicians and surgeons, teams that go and perform surgeries, hands on experience with the junior doctors in country. So you have two separate things, they can send you their staff and you train them, or you can send your team where they perform surgeries. This year the focus is more on hosting skilled workers, they want to reduce and divert the budget into hosting doctors.
Because as you know it is expensive, if they send you 50 doctors, those 50 doctors the govt. has to cover their stay, travel and training in addition to all of that, those 50 doctors will have 50 empty clinics during the training program, their patients won’t be seen so when they return there will be a backlog.
RT: So health sector corporations trying to get into Iraq, if they want to establish a presence then helping with capacity building, those kind of initiatives, this is an advantageous approach?
SJ: Two hundred percent. Yes, and I think this is what some of them are doing already, they are using this for access in terms of training staff and also to show that they are building up Iraqi human resources. So they are building up resources, some of them have developed or created programs so they take Iraqi talent, put them in global or regional programs and inject them back to the operations in Iraq.
So they help and improve skills and exposure and then those Iraqis take the lead on the ground which is very important. However what I have seen as a successful model for MNCs is those that use a hybrid model as I told you, they either work with local companies but they don’t leave the local companies to do whatever they want, they have a mixed management team.
So take GSK, they have a local company called GSK Iraq, and you have GSK global or regional resources within that company so they try to get the culture of the company and you know do vice versa, take some of the local resources and take them to the regional headquarters where they get more exposure, because what is missing is there is there is a way of doing business in Iraq, and this has been a historical way over the last 20- 30 years and you can not do business if you don’t understand the dynamic.
But if you as a major company just come into the country and do business , the way things happen in Iraq it has to be balanced. So you can say we are a company we can sell medication we can sell you pills, but we are a global company we can also train physicians. Or there is a new way of treatment, why don’t we try it. So that moves a company from just selling pills into being a healthcare partner, in the eyes of the government. I am working with a client, a pharmaceutical company and their market access strategy is to make a nationwide survey with the ministry. And the ministry is like “you guys are a medication company, why do you want to do that? “ So that ministry attitude is very common in the developed world, still very new to Iraq.
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