January 18, 2024
Spirit Health Foundation and Unjani Clinics will collaborate to make healthcare even more accessible and affordable in low-income communities across South Africa. The collaboration will enable clinics operated and owned by professional nurses in the Unjani Clinic Network to scale up education, screening, monitoring and treatment through community health teams and best-in-class digital health platforms.
Through Spirit Health Foundation’s support, Unjani Clinic Health Promotion Officers will be equipped with the Clinitouch platform on mobile phones for community education, screening and monitoring for a wide range of health conditions. The nurses will be able to remotely monitor the data captured at the clinics and take timely action to protect community members based on the score generated by Clinitouch’s smart algorithms. Spirit Health Foundation will work with Unjani Clinics to install the Clinitouch platform and services, build health worker capacity, develop clinical pathways, provide monitoring and evaluation, and deploy the solution across the Unjani Clinic Network in South Africa.
This novel digital health system approach will enable Unjani Clinics’ expanding network of over 190 care settings to reach more underserved communities with the essential healthcare they need more effectively and efficiently, protecting and improving the health of people most in need across South Africa.
Since 2014, Unjani Clinics NPC has provided funding and support to professional nurses to set up, own and sustainably run clinics providing quality primary healthcare in low-income communities across South Africa. There are now over 178 Unjani Clinics (as well as 12 mobile health pods), providing over 90,000 consultations per month on infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases and maternal and child health.
With its proven sustainable, scalable clinic model and the support of world-leading partner organisations, Unjani Clinics has the ambitious goal of establishing 600+ care settings across the country by 2031, but more importantly, impacting the lives of millions of South Africans.
Launched at the end of 2023, Spirit Health Foundation is an independent, non-profit organisation making health easy and accessible in underserved communities across the world, in particular Sub-Saharan Africa. The Foundation provides all the healthtech platforms and services of Spirit Health Group (a leading international organisation and major partner to the NHS for two decades) as in-kind funding to partners, and works closely with them to build smarter health systems to protect people’s health and lives in even the most hard to reach communities. At the heart of the approach is the award-winning Clinitouch digital platform used extensively across the NHS in the UK and multiple countries globally.
Lynda Toussaint, Unjani Clinics NPC CEO commented on the collaboration:
“Educating, creating awareness and driving calls to action for health at community-level will help achieve our goal of impacting the lives of millions of South Africans. Equipping our Health Promotion Officers with the right healthtech tools and knowledge will help enable this.”
Spirit Health Foundation CEO, Rich Bryson, added:
“Unjani Clinics has been doing brilliant work over the last decade through their innovative clinic model. We’re really excited to collaborate with them and help their expanding network of clinics make an even bigger difference to the health and lives of undeserved communities across South Africa”.
Unjani Clinics and Spirit Health Foundation will be implementing the first phase of the initiative through clinics on-the-ground in the first half of 2024, and will be sharing progress throughout the year ahead.
Want to find out more?
- For more information on Unjani Clinics NPC email info@unjani.org or visit www.unjaniclinic.co.za
- For further information on Spirit Health Foundation, please contact hello@spirithealthfoundation.org
