AS the country strives to reduce the cost of health care while maintaining quality and safety of services, efforts are underway to have guidelines that promote health workers to be innovative.

Acting Assistant Director for Health Service Inspectorate and Quality Assurance in the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, Dr Eliudi Eliakimu, said recently that what is needed today is innovations that will improve value while minimising costs for care provided.

"The global focus now is towards improving the value of services provided to clients. This takes into account the challenges of resource availability and the impact of economic downturn (recession)," he explained.

Dr Eliakimu cited that in the 2007 National Health Policy document, one of the goals is to provide essential health services that are geographically equitable, of acceptable quality standards, affordable and sustainable.

He said that a renowned expert in competitive strategy and principles from Harvard University Business School Professor Michael Porter in an article published together with Dr Thomas Lee, Professor of Medicine and Health Policy and Management at Harvard gives insight to strategies that will fix health care published in the Harvard Business Review October 2013.

"In the article, they recommend shifting focus to value of health care provided which is defined as health outcomes that matter to patients divided by costs of delivering the outcome," he elaborated.

In a recent article that was ran by the Times of India, a common paper clip was used by Dr Pushkar Waknis, a Punebased maxillofacial surgeon, to keep the skin flap in place while operating.

Not only is it effective, but also more easily accessible than the textbook prescribed Raney clips, which are hard to find in India and, at Rs 40,000 (approximately 1m/-) a box.

"The paper clip can drastically bring down the cost of the surgery," says Dr Waknis who works at Dr D Y Patil College of Dentistry and Nursing in Pune. He co-wrote a paper on this innovation, which was published in the Journal of Maxillofacial and Oral Surgery last year.

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