Developed-developing country partnerships: Benefits to developed countries?

International cooperation is crucial for improving global health outcomes. One such form of cooperation occurs through international partnerships, which lead, stimulate, and facilitate action on health challenges through programming, advocacy, and technical support. Just as the preference for the term ‘global health’ has increased [1], so has the shift in philosophies and attitudes to partnership-building. Partners today increasingly seek mutuality of benefits, including two-way flow of energies, expertise, and knowledge to justify investment.At the same time, more and more health leaders are turning their attention to developing countries to generate effective solutions for health [2-6]. One such leader is Lord Nigel Crisp, the former Chief Executive Officer of the U.K. National Health Service, who states, “rich countries can learn a great deal about health and health services from poorer ones…combining the learning from rich and poor countries can give us new insight on how to improve health” [2]. The private sector has already embraced the sensation—termed ‘reverse innovation’—and corporations are rapidly promoting the spread of developing country innovations worldwide [3].African Partnerships for Patient Safety (APPS) is a WHO programme that has built patient safety partnerships between hospitals in Africa and Europe. Partnership strengthening is a core APPS programme objective [7] and building a business case for international cooperation (in particular, developed-developing country partnerships) is a critical component of this objective. This interest informed the main purpose of our research. In this paper, we relay existing information on health system benefits accrued by developed countries from partnering with developing countries, and then gauge whether developing country health system experiences could form the basis of future international cooperation.Five MeSH search headings, “health care quality”, “access and evaluation”, “international cooperation”,