With only a week and a half until the Local Production and Technology Transfer workshops in Africa, we are kicking into high gear (even more than usual) to get everything ready.
Just to recap, the workshops are meant to be capacity building events during which all different stakeholders in medical devices can come together to increase awareness of the technology transfer process and create a plan of action to increase access to priority medical devices. These workshops will take place in Nigeria, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and South Africa, and each will be geared towards the local needs of the individual country.
Recently, my supervisor and I have been working on making sure that these workshops will allow for all the local participants to be actively involved. This means revising the agendas and letting local experts in various areas take the stage more than the representative from WHO headquarters. Although we have here at HQ a lot of valuable information and resources on things like regulatory processes and health technology assessment, we have agreed that the solutions to the problems these countries face with respect to medical devices can found in the individual countries—not necessarily in one of our publications. So we are very excited to collaborate with people from all different fields (nurses, doctors, Patent Office, Ministry of Health, researchers, manufacturers, etc.) on the relevant topics.
The new agenda will allow for local participants to discuss topics such as procurement, maintenance, intellectual property, technology transfer, business development, and more, and there will hopefully be a lot of open dialogue throughout the workshop. On the second day, medical device innovators will get the chance to present on their work and other participants will also get to present on medical devices that may not even exist yet, simply presenting ideas that could benefit the country based on their own observations and experience. We are even inviting innovators we met at the EPFL conference in Lausanne earlier in the summer.
Besides logistics and travel arrangements, I am also working a lot on the LPTT report to try and make it as complete as possible before the workshops take place. Earlier in my internship, I learned a lot about the project and about local production of medical devices just by editing sections of the draft of the report and working with the data analysis. Over a month later, I feel really attached to this project already, and I am really enjoying writing new sections of the report. After the workshops, we will be able to add the outcomes of the workshops and complete the country profiles, which describe the context of the medical device industry in each country.
Even with tons of projects and publications to be tackled, our small group manages to make so much progress each day. Being in the office with others in the late evening when everyone should be home eating dinner or watching the World Cup is when I realize how much everyone here really cares about the work we do. I recently attended an inter-cluster meeting on in vitro diagnostics, and we started by going around the room and introducing ourselves and what area we work in. People would say things like “prequalification of diagnostic devices” or “medical device dossiers”. And the members from our unit simply say “medical devices”…Sometimes I think it would easier to have a narrower scope to focus in on, but then it would not be nearly as exciting!
