Kwanele Asante: Consistent remuneration empowers African patient partners
Kwanele Asante, Award Winning Health & Human Rights Activist, posted the following on LinkedIn:
“The global conversation continues.
Consistent and fair remuneration is essential to empower African patient partners to contribute to health policy decisions and policies that affect them. ~ Kwanele Asante
As promised, here is what some organisations are doing to enable meaningful engagement and substantive social participation.
WHO GCM/NCD – leading by example
They implemented one of the key enablers for the operationalization of meaningful engagement ~ per their landmark normative WHO Framework on Meaningful Engagement (ME) of People Living with NCDs, Mental Health and Neurological Conditions – published in May 2023.
5.1 Sustainable financing provides that:
Meaningful engagement should be supported by sustainable financing for all engagements with individuals with lived experience remunerated at a rate equivalent to that for technical experts.
The Framework suggests 3 standards for the operationalization of each ME enabler – gold, silver, bronze (to accommodate national cost considerations).
Walking the talk: In June 2023 the WHO/GCM commissioned 8 of us lived experience experts to lead author pieces for a soon-to-be published WHO GCM special series on meaningful engagement in partnership with a prominent medical journal.
Each of us patient partners was paid at WHO technical expert rate. At gold standard, based on our academic qualifications and years of professional health equity advocacy experience.
The WHO set a daily rate and we were paid in two installments (at journal submission milestones), and according to the payment band level our academic qualifications, yrs of field experience we were individually pegged at, and the number of writing days we were each contracted for.
The rates for the band levels were as follow:
Band level A: 198 – 349 US$, per day
Band level B: 350 – 499 US$, per day
Band level C: 500 – 625 US$, per day
My academic qualifications and global advocacy experience of 17 years were pegged at level Band C.
The 8 lived experience experts were recruited from the global NCDs/Mental Health lived experience community. So there was global pay parity because the rates were standard for all.
In May 2024 the WHO GCM/NCDs appointed a professionally remunerated Lived Experience Experts Symposium Steering Committee to help co-design, co-develop and co-implement its NCD Symposia strategies in preparation for the 2025 United Nations General Assembly High Meeting on NCDSs.
Disclaimer: I do not know what the expert rate is for this cohort of lived experience experts,
I shall share another example of fair remuneration and/or fair dealings for global conference travel for patient partners tomorrow.”
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ESMO 2024 Congress
September 13-17, 2024
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ASCO Annual Meeting
May 30 - June 4, 2024
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Yvonne Award 2024
May 31, 2024
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OncoThon 2024, Online
Feb. 15, 2024
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Global Summit on War & Cancer 2023, Online
Dec. 14-16, 2023