Established in 1998, Foundation of Orthopedics and Complex Spine (FOCOS) has performed thousands of complex surgeries and offered orthopedic care to more than many tens of thousands of people in West Africa. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) has supported FOCOS’s work for more than 15 years, during which time major strides have been made in the quality of care available, including with the opening of FOCOS Orthopedic Hospital in Ghana in 2012.
SNF has supported FOCOS in taking steps toward building a new rehabilitation center in Ghana that would provide access to essential rehabilitation, prosthetics, and orthotics, all while serving as a regional center of excellence and train health care staff in best practices to help foster system-wide improvements across West Africa. The construction project is on hold for the time being, but substantial groundwork has been laid for when it restarts.
In the meantime, SNF grant funding has supported the nonprofit in putting in place an information management system, pursuing quality improvement initiatives, implementing staff training, and more at the FOCOS Orthopedic Hospital in Ghana.
For the organization’s founder, FOCOS’s mission is personal, a response to the situation he faced growing up in Ghana. “Not many Ghanaian children born in the pre-independence era of Ghana lived to see their fifth birthday,” says Dr. Oheneba Boachie-Adjei. “Thousands of children, young men and women in Africa and other parts of the third world face such fates and miss out on opportunities and the dreams of their lives.” FOCOS works to help ensure that lives, especially young lives, are not needlessly lost or stunted through lack of access to treatments that are readily available elsewhere.