King’s Somaliland Partnership is one of the UK’s largest and longest-running global health partnerships

By:King’s Health Partner

King’s Somaliland Partnership (KSP) is one of the UK’s largest and longest-running global health partnerships. The partnership connects UK and Somaliland experts and institutions to improve healthcare in Somaliland.

Somaliland is a self-declared but internationally unrecognised state in the Horn of Africa.

Somaliland faces many challenges including poor health indicators, a shortage of well-trained health workers, weak regulation, international isolation, but it is making progress against the odds. Emerging from a conflict that only ended in the 1990s, this young democracy has held successive free and fair elections and remains peaceful in a tumultuous region.

King’s Health Partners works with education institutions, healthcare providers and government bodies in Somaliland to build capacity in the country’s healthcare system and deliver training and support to educators and clinicians.

KSP is run from the King’s Centre for Global Health and Health Partnerships, alongside partnerships with Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Their mission is to help governments improve healthcare and its outcomes by empowering people, strengthening organisations and enhancing systems. As part of the King’s Health Partners Academic Health Sciences Centre, the Centre brings the health, academic and development communities together, drawing on the strengths of each.

Future Priorities

Following extensive planning and consultation, KSP has selected four future priorities to sit alongside their existing higher education work:

• Clinical engagement: Delivering hospital management, quality improvement and clinical programmes, combined with national level policy and regulation work

• Clinical specialty training: Supporting the development of much-needed postgraduate clinical training for Somaliland nurses and doctor

• Research and research capacity building: Delivering capacity building programmes and linking Somaliland partners with UK academics to carry out primary research in partner priority areas

• Facilitating Somaliland partners to secure and manage their own resources: Supporting Somaliland partners to secure and manage resources to pursue priorities independently of KSP.

Projects

KSP’s flagship Prepared for Practice (PfP) project is the first to begin implementing under the Department for International Development’s Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education Innovation and Reform programme. PfP is addressing Somaliland’s health workforce crisis by transforming Somaliland higher education. Read more here.

Project Impact

King’s Somaliland Partnership has:

• examined every doctor and the majority of nurses to have graduated since Somaliland’s founding

• pioneered online teaching, becoming the first organisation to deliver a real-time, interactive programe in a fragile state

• co-published 35% of Somaliland’s health research output, as of 2016.

Current volunteer opportunities

King’s Somaliland Partnership are recruiting volunteer clinicians with experience in emergency care to work with Hargeisa Group Hospital in Somaliland on triage and early warning scores. If you are interested, please read below for further information and how to apply.

The STEP project aims to improve the quality of care for trauma and surgical patients at Hargeisa Group Hospital through the introduction of triage in the emergency department, the use of early warning scores (EWS) on surgical wards, implementation of the WHO’s safe surgical checklist and primary trauma care training. This volunteering opportunity is part of this project.

For more detail please read the STEP Project volunteer brief.