This and other posts that follow are taken from an interview with Dr. Ian in the Summit Business Review.
Summit Business Review: You have set up IHK successfully and you have been prominent in providing affordable healthcare in the country. How have you managed to achieve all that?
Dr. Ian Clarke: I am a Ugandan citizen, although I come from Northern Ireland. I have lived in Uganda for 22 years now. I have therefore experience in both a developing and a developed country. My passion is for accessibility and sustainability of healthcare delivery. If I had continued spending all my time seeing individual patients, I would not have had time to develop and facilitate, the systems and the people as part of International Medical Group. My vision has been to set up facilities that are recognised as a centre of excellence in the provision of health services and because I have chosen to do this in the private sector, I also have to make the model work commercially so that I can pay my staff and run the infrastructure.
We have three things that drive our business decisions: First, is the normal bottom line of being commercially viable – you have to make some money to do that. Second is social impact i.e. to make a difference to people through our delivery of medical services. And third is advocacy – to influence policy for the better. Those are the values that have influenced our strategy and business model.
In health care, one must be willing to sacrifice. I started off from the village treating people under a tree deep in Luwero, just after the war that brought the current Government to leadership. From there, we started a mission hospital – Kiwoko hospital. After 6 to 8 years, I saw a gap in health care delivery in Uganda – especially the provision of quality health services. We have built up the infrastructure of International Medical Group and with my team, we have also been finding ways to use our own infrastructure to reach out to the poor. We do sort of cost sharing – whereby we charge the middle class, and channel some resources to the poor through International Medical Foundation. We have actually used the private sector to develop the facilities which are then also used to reach out to the poor. (an example of this is our clinic in Lira, Northern Uganda)
