For the first five years, the Foundation conducted several healthcare education campaigns throughout the Kingdom of Morocco, while bringing assistance to a few hospitals. ENT specialists, neurologists, neurosurgeons, ophthalmologists, paramedical staff and healthcare technicians took part in these campaigns. These campaigns extended over five to seven days in a cities or provinces in Morocco, and consisted in three types of activities: medical and surgical healthcare, conferences and seminars, and open meetings dealing with healthcare education and awareness of nervous system diseases. Doctors from the public and private sectors practicing locally attended these events.
Ten campaigns were conducted this way in the wilayas and provinces of Rabat, Casablanca, Tangier, Tetouan, Chefchaouen, Al Hoceima, Nador, Fez, and Oujda. These campaigns lasted over an average period of five days. They were all conducted by the Foundation, in collaboration with the provincial management of the Ministry of Health, Ibn Sina University Hospital Center, and Hopital des Specialites.The results of these campaigns are mentioned in the annual reports of the Foundation.

Beside purchasing medical devices for low-income patients, the Foundation enabled for the launch of the Department of Neurosurgery at Hopital El Kortobi in Tangier, by purchasing medical devices in 1990. In 1993-94, the Foundation purchased devices to be used in the operating theater at Hopital des Specialites in Rabat: a Cavitron ultrasonic surgical aspirator, a stereotactic frame, an operating microscope, and a surgical laser. The overall cost of this equipment amounted to five million Dirhams.
This equipment have allowed for a giant leap forward in the practice of neurosurgery, as each of these devices represented a revolutionary advance in cranial surgery: the ultrasonic surgical aspirator enables surgeons to break brain tumors into smaller pieces and to aspirate them. The operating microscope brings light and magnification to neurosurgery, which allows surgeons to differentiate between normal and pathological structures, and to operate millimetric elements. The surgical laser beam acts on pathological lesions so they evaporate, while the stereotactic frame allows the neurosurgeon to carry out surgery without opening the skull.
Of course, hundreds of low-income patients benefited from these technologies at the hospital.
All this equipment required maintenance to operate in an optimal way. However, the financial means provided by the hospital budget were limited. Therefore, it was essential that the Foundation thought of a more developed and productive public-private partnership management mode, to ensure a private non-profit management of cutting-edge equipment purchased by the Foundation, to grant both revenues for maintenance and amortization.

In 1993, through a donation from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Foundation could purchase cutting-edge equipment to explore the nervous system: a magnetic resonance imaging device with a power of 1.5 Tesla, allowing for higher quality anatomical images of cerebral, vascular, cervical, thoracic, abdominal structures, and limbs in three dimensions.
The MRI technique was used in medicine in Europe and North America in 1982. When the equipment was purchased by the Foundation for the benefit of Hopital des Specialites, it was the first MRI device to be used in a public hospital throughout Morocco. The cost of the device was thirty million Dirhams. The maintenance of such equipment is very costly. Therefore, as the equipment was a donation from King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to Hassan II Foundation, we had to inform Late King Hassan II. When presenting the new technology, we insisted on the high cost of its maintenance. Late King Hassan II suggested that we find a management mode that would help ensure its amortization and maintenance. The Foundation then suggested to Ibn Sina Hospital Center and to the Ministry of Health to ensure the operation of the MRI Unit according to a private non-profit mode, with the aim of having sufficient revenues for both maintenance and amortization, while at the same time allowing low-income patients to benefit from the MRI.
Thereby, in 1993, the first partnership agreement was signed by the Foundation, ISHC, and the Ministry of Health for the management of the MRI Unit that was brought inside Hopital des Specialites. According to the agreement, the Foundation shall ensure the administrative and financial management of the unit, while ISHC shall ensure its medical management, and should send medical and paramedical staff on temporary assignment so they can work at the MRI Unit on a temporary basis.
This public-private partnersthip that was made official through a written agreement, was beneficial for this cutting-edge technology that was introduced in Morocco for the first time, and whose extended failures had to be solved to meet the patients’ urgent examinations. The MRI maintenance has been carried out year after year. Thousands of patients could be examined (3 to 4 thousand a year), and the device could be replaced twelve years later, in 2006, by a newly-purchased high-performance MRI device. The MRI Unit is still currently managed according to the same mode.

This public-private partnership is an instance of an unquestionably successful and beneficial partnership for both parties. It was implemented 26 years ago (1993-2019) that the Ministry of Health and University Hospital Centers should adopt to purchase cutting-edge technologies that are needed for medicine to advance, but whose cost and maintenance go beyond the budget of these institutions.

Construction and equipment of the National Center for Rehabilitation and Neurosciences (NCRNS)