Healthcare of Excellence in Africa

The ANME (African Network of Medical Excellence) is an EMERGENCY initiative that was established in 2009 with the aim of promoting the construction of medical Centres of Excellence across Africa, based on the model of the Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery. The second facility in this network, the Centre of Excellence in Paediatric Suregery in Entebbe, Uganda, is currently under construction.

Free treatment and medical excellence are the foundations of the healthcare model that the members of our network are working to implement in their countries.

Free healthcare is the essential prerequisite for providing prompt treatment to anyone who needs it.

Medical excellence guarantees high clinical standards for individual procedures and promotes the training of qualified healthcare professionals, research development and local healthcare systems.

In February 2010, EMERGENCY and the Sudanese Ministry of Health organised a regional meeting in Khartoum, attended by ministers and health authorities of 11 African countries, to strengthen collaboration between the countries that form the African Network of Medical Excellence (ANME). The meeting produced this joint appeal to the international community:

We, Ministers of Health and representatives of the health authorities of the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, attending the first Annual Conference of the African Network of Medical Excellence, jointly organized in Khartoum, Sudan, by the National Ministry of Health of Sudan and the international NGO EMERGENCY,

Reaffirming the principle that the right to healthcare is a basic right of every individual, as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;

Recalling the principles of Equality, Quality and Social Responsibility stated in the ‘Manifesto for a Human Rights-Based Medicine’, which calls for high-quality and free-of-charge healthcare for all;

Acknowledging the urgent need for Centres of Excellence in Africa to provide high standards of medical treatment through secondary and tertiary facilities, thus strenghtening disease prevention and primary healthcare delivery;

Considering the Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery, established by EMERGENCY in cooperation with the Ministry of Health of Sudan in Khartoum, as a replicable model in all our countries to provide high-quality care to our citizens and proper training to medical and non-medical professionals;

We commit to improving regional cooperation by establishing the African Network of Medical Excellence (ANME) in different medical specialities in order to strenghten our health systems on the national and regional level.

We jointly appeal to the international community of donors to support us and contribute to the successful implementation of this innovative, multi-disciplinary project by providing human and financial resources.

Signed on Thurday, 11 February 2010 – Khartoum, Sudan. On behalf of the Ministries of Health of: the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda.