Areas of focus
Scale up of disease control interventions for impact
In the past decade, excellent progress has been made in developing new and affordable tools for disease control and prevention, as well as increasing access to appropriate health care services. Significant gains have been made in initiatives and interventions aimed at ensuring universal access to long lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs), introducing and scaling up malaria rapid diagnostic tests to allow parasite based diagnosis of malaria in low-resource settings, rolling out seasonal malaria chemoprevention and improving integrated community case management (iCCM) services. These efforts to scale up globally recommended best practices have shown significant impact.Malaria Consortium provides technical support and promotes experience sharing with frontline health workers and ministries of health to improve capacities at all levels of health systems, enabling context tailored and sustainable rollout of interventions at a large scale.
Some of the major interventions Malaria Consortium supports are:
Some of the major interventions Malaria Consortium supports are:
- Rolling out of rapid diagnostic tests and external quality assurance of diagnostics in Uganda
- Building capacity of health workers on malaria case management in Nigeria
- Large-scale distribution of long lasting insecticide treated nets in Uganda and Mozambique
- Bringing seasonal malaria chemoprevention to scale in seven countries in the Sahel
- Supporting integrated community case management (iCCM) in Uganda, Mozambique, Nigeria and South Sudan
Improving quality of care in the public sector
As part of our mission to overcome health systems challenges and bottlenecks, Malaria Consortium works with ministries of health to improve the quality of health service delivery. Some of these efforts include establishing mechanisms for quality assurance for parasite-based diagnosis of malaria, and introducing best practice for strengthening supervision and competency improvement of front line health workers. We also support the introduction, scale up and appropriate use of quality assured commodities and health devices.
We also work on:
- building human resource capacity through the development of appropriately tailored training curricula and user-friendly training materials, logistical and technical support to training rollout, and strengthening support supervision
- providing technical support to ministries of health in the review and updating of national policies and guidelines informed by best practice
- improving the management of the supply chain for medical supplies through improvement of stock management skills and systems, and by quickly identifying and addressing bottlenecks in service delivery
- carrying out implementation research on improvement to supervision of community health workers.
Expanding access and quality of health services through the private sector
In several countries in the region, a significant proportion of people first seek care outside the public health care system, often in poorly regulated points of access. In Nigeria and Uganda, it is estimated that over 60 percent of care seekers first turn to privately owned service delivery points. In order to achieve better overall health outcomes, efforts must be made to improve the quality of service provision in privately owned service points, and the quality of the supply chain supporting these sites must be ensured. It is important to work closely with private providers in these countries – manufacturers, distributers and end-user services providers – to promote access to high quality services. Malaria Consortium, working together with private health providers, has contributed to:- expanding coverage of life-saving interventions and quality healthcare services for those seeking care in the private sector
- increasing sustainability of public health interventions by meeting health seekers in the private sector at the point of need
- promoting behaviour change among private sector health workers, ensuring the provision of appropriate health services
- improving public-private partnerships – in collaboration with ministries of health.
Some of these efforts have also required working with manufacturers to ensure they respond to market demand while producing affordable products to increase access.
Promoting evidence-based health programming
Malaria Consortium initiatives in the region are implemented and driven by robust evidence and planning, taking into account current best practices and contributing to the knowledge base of various intervention areas.By disseminating learning, Malaria Consortium influences decision-making at the national, regional and international levels. Our operational research answers pertinent questions that improve the impact of interventions. Some of the areas in which we have contributed research are:
We are also conducting research on the following topics in Africa: