Benefiting the NHS through innovation: how to ensure international health partnerships are genuinely reciprocal

To achieve this, power needs to be acknowledged and accounted for; learning ‘about’ oneself or the low-income country (LIC) is not a substitute for learning ‘from’ the LIC, and the propensity for high-income country partners to set the standard for what is ‘worthy knowledge’ will need continuous and conscious challenge. Reciprocity is poorly conceptualised as a term and practice within international health partnerships (IHPs); however, it is key to an effective IHP and is possible through explicit shared decision-making processes and willingness from both partners to learn technical expertise from each other. Investment in IHPs has increased over the last decade and the benefits they bring in terms of technical cooperation for the LMIC are apparent.4 The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the need for creating genuinely reciprocal partnerships; it has revealed fractures in the UK’s public health system and there are clear opportunities to learn from contexts that have responded in a more coordinated and effective manner. There are multiple opportunities to learn from LMICs6 but other than a few notable examples such as oral rehydration sachets, kangaroo care, Ponseti treatment for clubfoot and the GE Mac 400 ECG machine,7 there remains a paucity of examples where LMIC innovations have been explicitly adopted into HICs.8 In 2019, with funding from Health Education England and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, THET sought to build the evidence base for such instances through a call for evidence and the funding of Innovation Fellowships.