Together for health: UK and India pen MoU on health cooperation

Health and disease was one of the major areas identified for collaboration between the UK and India at the Indo-UK Science & Innovation Council last year, and it’s been a regular topic on this blog ever since. Here’s Himangi Bhardwaj, our Health Adviser in New Delhi, bringing the latest news on Indo-UK Health…

19th May saw some exciting activity in the bilateral UK-India health space. The Commonwealth Ministers’ Meet at the World Health Assembly, Geneva, also marked the signature of the overarching bilateral Memorandum of Understanding on health cooperation at Geneva.  The UK-India partnership in health is long-standing, and brings real benefits to people , quite literally -saving and improving lives in both countries and in the world.

This agreement is a significant step towards deepening the partnership between the two countries in health, and was signed by the Union Health Minister for India, Ghulam Nabi Azad, and Secretary of State for Health UK, Jeremy Hunt. Minister Azad described the agreement as a historic event and a great milestone, and was extremely optimistic that it is going to usher in a new era of cooperation in health between the two countries.

All the areas of cooperation defined in the MoU are directly or indirectly linked to research and innovation. These areas are comprehensive and include exchange on health policy; human resources for health with particular focus on skill development and training for both medical and allied healthcare workers; regulatory issues such as quality control for devices and medicines, and quality standards; and health technology development, especially with an eye towards cost-effectiveness. The Wellcome Trust R&D for Affordable Healthcare in India programme is a good existing example of something in this space.

Cooperation on primary care and public health infrastructure and capacity are two other key areas mentioned in the MoU that are already witnessing co-funded activity in some Indian States in the form of evidence-based pilot projects to strengthen the health system and upgrade primary care. The MoU also stresses on global health security and the importance of UK-India collaboration to build on the comparative strengths of the two countries to improve healthcare services and capacity in other developing countries.

Health-focused research, a recurring theme in the bilateral partnership, finds a place in the MoU under all the broad thematic areas, in the form of evidence-generation for primary care, landscape scoping for human resource skilling needs, and biomedical research and innovation for health technology development, particularly for creating cost-effective solutions. The MoU takes forward the existing relationship between MRC and ICMR that jointly funds projects on chronic, non-communicable diseases prevalent in UK and India, and also sets the stage for a soon-to-be signed MoU between NICE International, UK and the Department of Health Research, a division of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, India, for strategic and technical cooperation with regard to evidence-informed healthcare policy and practice.

The benefits of this agreement and its overarching nature are already making themselves obvious. The first workshop to discuss the implementation of the MoU, took place even before the signature, in February, at the behest of the Indian Ministry of Health, and saw some of the foremost health policy experts from the two countries getting together to chart the real way forward in New Delhi, over two days of intense discussions. All areas mentioned in the MoU were stressed upon, and a joint committee’s creation is now impending. At the State level, this national MoU serves as an icebreaker and a rough framework for cooperation with the UK and is a useful tool to design individual partnerships adapted to the needs of each Indian State.

It is a great milestone in the partnership that has some very strong bonds and it definitely could lead to a stronger, deeper, and wider relationship between the two countries!

Himangi Bhardwaj