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Our Priorities > Enhancing Access Addressing National Health Challenges

Clinical Nutrition Training in China

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Improving Health Care for Aging Populations

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A Day for Women’s Health

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Investing in Health

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Since 2007, the Abbott Fund Institute of Nutrition Science in China has worked to improve the quality of care delivered to the nation’s children, training almost 800 physicians and nearly 400 nurses and dietitians in clinical nutrition.

In Europe, Abbott works with government agencies to help address the changing health care landscape. In 2011, we participated in the Economist Healthcare Conference in Geneva, exchanging ideas for sustainable health care solutions for an aging population.

Many women in India are unaware of the risks of heart disease and other emerging health challenges. Our True Care office in Mumbai invited employees for an educational Woman’s Day, filled with informative discussions and even some entertaining games based on health facts.

Abbott works to make a positive, enduring difference in the health of people around the world. In 2011, Abbott and the Abbott Fund contributed more than $730 million in grants, product donations, community partnerships and efforts to strengthen health care systems around the world.

In many nations, forging close government partnerships offers the most effective path to enhanced health care access. In developing and developed nations alike, Abbott engages in public-private partnerships that help broaden access to critically needed testing and treatment services.

India, for example, accounts for 38 percent of the world population lacking access to essential medicines. There we work closely with the country's Ministry of Health and with many local governments to help improve delivery of services. Improving India's health care access poses special challenges because 70 percent of the population lives in remote rural and poor urban areas. However, our more than 12,000 Indian employees constitute a strong, dedicated presence, and they are committed to enhancing health care access, even in hard-to-reach communities.

For instance, our True Care business unit brings high-quality and affordable medicines to people in more than 10,000 remote towns and villages. The business takes an innovative approach to developing a sales force – hiring graduates from multiple education backgrounds who have local language skills and ties to the communities they will target. We then provide intensive training to help the sales force conduct education programs on basic diseases. More than 38,000 health care practitioners took part in these programs last year, and we believe that the local ties of our sales force play a critical role in helping advance the quality of care delivered to their neighbors.

Along with its educational efforts, our True Care business has introduced new combination medicines that specifically target local needs, including a new treatment to help treat drug-resistant strains of infectious diseases such as typhoid. Abbott also recently piloted a program at LNJP Hospital in New Delhi for thyroid testing of women in the first trimester of pregnancy. We are now planning to extend that program to several other regional hospitals.

Improving Care in Rural China

In China, Abbott is working with the government and local health care professionals to address the quality of care in rural health care centers. We also are helping to address China's changing disease patterns. For example, nearly twice as many Chinese patients with diabetes die of a complication called diabetic ketoacidosis than patients in developed countries. A key reason is the limited availability of testing equipment in China. To help the Chinese government close this gap, we are pioneering new testing methods for use in Chinese hospitals and homes. We have also introduced OptiumXceed, which is currently the only imported monitoring system available in China that can test both glucose and ketones.

Similarly, in Korea, Abbott is partnering with the Korean College of Rheumatology and a prominent patient association, along with government agencies and local NGOs, to help raise understanding and awareness of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Because the disease afflicts four times more women than men in Korea – and many female patients do not work outside the home – the social costs of RA were relatively unknown until recently. To help various stakeholders better understand the socioeconomic impact of RA, we helped to develop a campaign called "Love for Women in RA" featuring photo exhibitions, lectures, walking tours and other tactics to encourage earlier diagnosis and treatment. As a result of this campaign, the treatment environment for RA care improved and reimbursement coverage for RA patients increased.

Sustainable Approaches to Health Care in Europe

Meantime, in Europe, Abbott is working with regional, national and pan-European government agencies to help address the changing disease burden and to promote more effective and sustainable health care systems. For example, we are actively contributing to the European Commission's recently created Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Aging, whose goal is to increase the average healthy life span within the European Union by two years by 2020. All of Abbott's business divisions have considerable expertise in aging, and so we provide input to the ongoing discussions of the partnership and the commission. Additionally, we participated in the Economist Healthcare Conference in Geneva in 2011, exchanging ideas for sustainable health care solutions for an aging population with a variety of stakeholders.

At the national level, in Spain, we helped develop a pioneering multi-stakeholder collaboration on needed improvements in national health care. Anchored by a comprehensive report from the former minister of health and consumer affairs, the initiative brought together patient groups, nurses, doctors, pharmacists, health care administrators, representatives of private industry and others for intense discussion of Spain's health care challenges and how multiple sectors can work together to create long-term solutions to contribute to the sustainability of the National Health System.

Similarly, in Portugal, we cosponsored a major conference in late 2011 on options for building a more sustainable Portuguese health system, working with TSF Radio, the country's leading source of radio news. The conference generated robust discussion of Portugal's health care challenges and received widespread media attention.

Additionally, in September 2011, Abbott Italy organized and sponsored a research and innovation conference in Rome, working in close collaboration with Assocobiotec, an association of small and midsized Italian biotechnology companies, to discuss the potential for advances in Italian biotechnology. The event also enabled Italian health care leaders to debate options for greater quality and efficiency in key therapeutic areas important to the Italian health care system, including oncology, nephrology and virology.