King Mohammed VI chaired, Saturday at the Royal Palace in Rabat, the signing ceremony of a partnership agreement between the Mohammed V Foundation for Solidarity, the Ministry of Health and Social Protection and the company MEDIOT Technology, relating to the deployment of a program of connected mobile medical units, intended to improve access to medical services for rural communities.
This program, the agreement of which was signed by Khalid Ait Taleb, Minister of Health and Social Protection, Mohammed El Azami, Coordinator and member of the Board of Directors of the Mohammed V Foundation for Solidarity, and Mohamed Ben Ouda, CEO of MEDIOT Technology, stems from the Sovereign’s deep conviction to make the right to have access to health services one of the major pillars for fostering citizenship and achieving global and integrated human development.
It is part of the Royal project to reform the health system and generalize social protection, and represents a new model of intervention which combines community-based care and telemedicine. This pilot program consists of the deployment of connected medical units in areas suffering from a deficit in access to health services.
Each unit includes a general practitioner, two nurses and an administrative assistant. They are equipped with cutting-edge biomedical equipment enabling face-to-face medical consultations for general medicine and specialized teleconsultations via a connection with the central telemedicine platform, made up of specialists in gynecology-obstetrics, pediatrics, endocrinology, dermatology, ENT, cardiology and pulmonology.
The implementation of this program is based, in a first phase of one year, on the deployment of fifty connected mobile medical units across the different regions of the Kingdom, and more precisely in forty provinces. The choice of provinces was made on the basis of an analysis of the positioning data of health centers at the provincial level.
The first phase of this program will require the mobilization of twenty specialist doctors for the central telemedicine platform, fifty general practitioners, 100 nurses and 100 assistants, spread across the different provinces. A budget of 180 million dirhams will be earmarked for its implementation.
The connected mobile medical unit program reflects the health department’s efforts to fight medical deserts and improve access to health services in rural areas, leveraging accumulated experience and know-how of the Mohammed V Foundation for Solidarity, for more than 20 years, in the organization of medical caravans for disadvantages populations living in areas far from medical facilities.