Strengthening public health policies for better healthcare in Africa

Policies are fundamentally linked to public health and play a vital role in the general wellness and safety of a population. Over the last century, the most notable improvements in population health were due, in part, to changes or improvements in policy. Life expectancy has increased significantly because of policies related to better sanitation, improved automobile safety, safer foods, vaccinations, and smoke-free air.

Public health policies refer to the laws, regulations, actions, and decisions implemented within society in order to promote wellness and ensure that specific health goals are met. Public health policies are multidisciplinary in nature, and consider the political, economic, social, cultural, and lifestyle determinants of health.

The development of effective health policies requires extensive research processes to determine what public health issues need to be addressed and to formulate the best subsequent solutions. Thus, public health policies create action from research and find widespread solutions to problems around both health intervention and prevention.

Policies reach broader populations and have a larger scope than individual-level interventions. Hence, once in place, public health policies can provide a more sustainable and efficient use of scarce public health resources.

Given these, many global and national efforts to improve health – including organisations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and other governmental and non-governmental agencies – emphasise policy change to make health promotion strategies more impactful and sustainable.

However, despite this policy focus, the development and management of public health policies in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), like those in Africa, are often ad hoc and fragmented due to resource constraints and a variety of other issues.

Read also: Public Health Communication: A critical tool for better healthcare in Africa

In Africa, poor policy processes significantly undermine the quality of health policy analysis, decision-making and ultimately public health program implementation. Concerted efforts are therefore needed to strengthen Africa’s capacity for the development of sustainable, evidence-based health policies.

Challenges confronting public health policies in Africa

Standardising health policy development could significantly improve the effectiveness of health programs in Africa. However, several challenges limit the successful development and implementation of public health policies on the continent.

A major challenge is human resource capacity constraints at individual and organisational levels. Many public health practitioners and researchers in Africa lack knowledge and skills related to planning, advocating for, implementing, or evaluating policy as an intervention.

Another significant barrier is severe budget constraints that restrict spending on policy administrative, coordination, and management functions. Thus, leading to poor health policy management practices that unnecessarily lengthen policy development and adoption processes, weaken policy performance monitoring, and delay scale up of programmatic best practices.

Other major challenges include communication gaps and poor networking between policymakers and researchers, and the non-involvement of healthcare recipients in identifying and planning care delivery needs.

Strategies to strengthen public health policies in Africa

Addressing the challenges of public health policy development and management in Africa requires concerted efforts from government officials, policymakers, researchers, public health professionals, and healthcare recipients. Public Health Policy is one the offerings at Bloom Public Health. Bloom Public Health therefore proposes the following as key strategies to strengthen public health policies in Africa:

1. Leveraging private sector expertise and experience: Collaboration and partnership with the private sector will enhance adoption of best practices for policy development and management processes. Private sector partnership is also vital to address financial resources constraints and for human resource development to bridge the knowledge and skills gaps in evidence-based policy making in Africa.

For example, Bloom Public Health has extensive experience working with African governments and policymakers to provide public health policy services including Baseline and Situation Analysis, Programme Development and Review, Policy and Legislative Analysis, Stakeholder Mapping and Analysis, and Health Policy and Systems Research.

2. Increasing involvement of health recipients in policymaking processes: Health policy making is not complete if the focus is mainly on government and providers; community participation is a vital element that cannot be overlooked.

To enhance the appreciation of health policies and increase buy-in, it is imperative that civil society, NGOs and communities are involved in developing local health policy research agendas, and in maintaining public debate about resources and priorities.

This is also necessary to ensure public health policies focus on equity, social justice and the poor, and address social, economic, political, ethical and management dimensions important to public health and health systems in general.

3. Strengthening researcher-policymaker partnership: The potential of partnerships between researchers and decision-makers in Africa must be fully evaluated and utilised. Establishing processes that can enhance collaboration and networking among researchers and policymakers is crucial for promoting the use of health policy and systems research (HPSR) in policy development.

Thus, providing reliable and rigorous evidence to inform the many critical decisions that must be made about health systems in Africa.

In Conclusion: Effective public health policies for the promotion of healthy lifestyles, disease and injury prevention, and the detection and appropriate response to diseases are essential to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 3, ‘Good Health and Well-being’ in Africa. Hence, African governments and relevant stakeholders must take action to ensure public health policies are bottom-up, sustainable and Africa focused.