The CFWshops Project

Micro-Franchising Model

A New Way Forward

The HealthStore Foundation® has combined established micro-enterprise principles with proven franchise business practices to create a micro-franchise business model called CFWshops.

Franchisees operate small drug shops or clinics strategically located to improve access to essential drugs. HealthStore clinics and shops enable trained health workers to operate their own businesses treating the diseases that cause 70-90% of illness and death in their communities while following HealthStore drug handling and distribution regulations calculated to ensure good practice.

A short-list of inexpensive generic drugs can effectively treat 70-90% of the children suffering and dying from infectious diseases in the developing world. Too often, people do not have access to these drugs. HealthStore seeks to improve access to these essential drugs using its micro-franchise business model.

The major goals of the CFWshops project are:

1. To create a reliable supply of high quality, low cost, essential drugs and to make them available to the people who need them when and where they are needed.
2. To treat childhood infectious diseases in the communities where children live, thus reducing congestion in the healthcare system so that scarce resources can be applied to others not so easily treated;
3. To reduce under age 5 mortality rates thus encouraging family planning and lower population growth rates;
4. To discourage the development of drug resistant microbes by the provision and appropriate use of adequate supplies of effective drugs; and
5. To improve community health through educational and prevention activities.

The mico-franchise business model engages the forces and participants in the marketplace to incent health care providers to follow good practices for the handling and distribution of essential drugs.

Franchisees enjoy the benefits of owning a valuable profit-making business but may retain it only by compliance with CFWshops drug handling and administration regulations. It is in their own self-interest for franchisees to follow the regulations. HealthStore believes that franchisees acting in their own self-interest will achieve more than a centralized command-and-control bureaucracies can.

The franchise model has delivered a wide variety of high quality, low cost goods and services throughout the world—including medicine—and has proven to be an effective method of mass distribution across a wide diversity of economic and cultural conditions.

The CFWshops franchise operating system includes an operating manual complete with policies, procedures and forms constituting a turn-key management system which, if followed, enables franchisees to conduct business and provide necessary compliance reports to The HealthStore Foundation®.

Franchisees are entitle to receive a supply of high quality, low cost drugs, management support, training and other valuable benefits from HealthStore. But, if the franchisee fails to comply with rules and reporting requirements, the franchise may be revoked. The system is designed to make the long term benefits of retaining the franchise worth too much to risk losing by breaking the rules. The rules are calculated to assure good drug handing and administration practices.

The system includes, among other things:

1. Proper procedures for the handling of drugs and the diagnosis and treatment of patients;
2. Regular reports along with routine and surprise inspections and investigations to test and maintain compliance with franchise regulations;
3. Management and clinical training in the use of the franchise system; and
4. Development of professional culture by promotion of inter-disciplinary contact, continuing education, and continuing education.

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