You’d think health ministers must be health professionals but Africa’s longest serving minister is an exception. He is not the only one
In Nigeria, there has been disagreement over who should be health minister since time immemorial.
While the country’s present and past presidents had always tapped medical professors to occupy the position, Cameroon which shares border with Nigeria has the longest serving health minister. His name is André Mama Fouda and he is a civil engineer. He has been Cameroon’s health minister since 2007.
Born in the Obobogo district of the country’s capital city of Yaoundé, Fouda attended the Francois-Xavier Vogt secondary school. After a baccalaureate in 1971, he joined the National Polytechnic School of Yaoundé (ENSP) and obtained in 1974 a degree in civil engineering (option public works and buildings). He also attended the Business Development Center in 1992.
The married Catholic and father of four began his career on January 1, 1974 at the Cameroon Realty Corporation as operational engineer. Then in the 90s, he assumed the position of Acting Director General.
He also served as the Director General of the Urban and Rural Land Use Planning and Equipment Mission, a position he held until he was appointed health minister.
Healthcare in Cameroon
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Cameroon has a population of 23,739,000 and per capita income of $2,940.
Life expectancy for women/men is 58/56 yrs while under 5 mortality is 57 per 1000 live births, while the probability of dying between 15 and 60 years m/f (per 1 000 population) is 362/321.
In Nigeria on the other hand, the health minister is a professor of obstetrics and gynecology yet life expectancy for women/men is 53/52 yrs while under 5 mortality is 69 per 1000 live births. Nigeria’s per capital income is almost twice that of Cameroon.
Focusing on life expectancy in males and females, the data available for Cameroon from the World Health Organization (WHO) showed Cameroon is competing favorably with Kenya and South Africa. The country is also outperforming Nigeria.
Cameroon is also making appreciable investments in health. Available data showed while the country’s total expenditure per capita is the lowest among the 4 countries selected for comparison, the health ministry under the leadership of an engineer is getting more proportion of the country’s GDP than Nigeria’s health sector is getting.
Fouda is not the only engineer serving as health minister. In Tunisia, the health ministry is also headed by an engineer Imed Hammami.
Unlike Fouda, Hammami is relatively new in his position he assumed on November 18 , 2017 following the death of Slim Chaker who died at the military hospital in Tunis following a heart attack during his participation in the marathon of Nourane organization for the promotion of the fight against breast cancer.
Hammami studied engineering at the National School of Engineering of Tunis. He has previously served as Minister of Employment and Vocational Training in the government of Youssef Chahed.
Cameroon versus Tunisia – Health Indices
According to the American Academy of Engineering, the suggestion that engineers join in the struggle to improve the health care system almost always elicits surprise, even though engineers have been actively involved in bioengineering and biomaterials engineering for years. In addition, publications on using operations-research techniques to model hospital operating rooms and schedule personnel and materials in various medical facilities date back more than three decades. Today, however, the participation of engineers is more important than ever before.
“Health care delivery today is in turmoil. Despite rapid advances in medical procedures and the understanding of diseases and their treatment, the efficiency, safety, and cost-effectiveness of the delivery of health care have not kept pace. Improvements in the delivery of services in other industries have simply not been transferred to health care,” the academy stated.
Changing the Health Care Environment
Industries, particularly large, entrenched industries, often find it difficult to change, even when they recognize that change is in their best interest. Therefore, a key driver of change is crisis, a situation that forces an industry either to change or, to put it bluntly, go under. Unlike other industries, however, health care cannot simply go under, so it must change. Like other industries, the academy suggested that health care must become more efficient, more responsive to patients’ (i.e., customers) needs, more flexible, safer, and of higher quality. Industries around the world aspire to achieve the same characteristics.
Bill Rouse, executive director of the Tennenbaum Institute at Georgia Institute of Technology, focuses in his paper on the complex, diffuse nature of health care delivery, which can only be described by a broader definition of “system.” Because of the nature of the system in which health care operates, he says, some of the corrective directions engineers usually pursue will not work. A complex adaptive system such as health care, he argues, is not amenable to the controls and feedback forces we generally ascribe to a system.
Even though system tools that have been used successfully in many other industries will not suffice to solve all of the operational problems of the health care system, the academy believe they are the best tools to improve the quality and efficiency of care until more powerful tools for optimizing this adaptive system can be developed.