Malaria Consortium was well represented at this week’s Third Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in Cape Town, which ran from 30 September until 3 October 2014. The conference was attended by 1,700 researchers, policymakers, managers and activists from over 90 countries and focused on the science and practice of people-centred health systems.
Representatives from Malaria Consortium presented four important posters highlighting the diverse range of subject areas, interventions and research methodologies undertaken by the organisation.
Three of these posters were presented on Thursday, 2 October:
Helen Counihan, Senior Public Health Specialist, gave a presentation entitled ‘Integrated community case management (iCCM) in practice: Lessons learnt from a participatory evaluation in three African countries’. This presents work from a qualitative study on the perceptions of stakeholders at various levels of the roll-out at scale of iCCM in South Sudan, Uganda and Zambia.
Christian Rassi, COMDIS-HSD Research Officer, presented a session entitled ‘Challenges to recording and reporting of uptake of intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy (IPTp) at facility level in Uganda’. The presentation highlighted some of the findings relating to data accuracy and reliability from a study exploring barriers to IPTp uptake in Uganda.
Also on Thursday, Agnes Nanyonjo, Research Officer based in Uganda and working on the inSCALE project, presented a poster entitled ‘Impact of an integrated community case management programme on uptake of appropriate diarrhoea and pneumonia treatments in Uganda: A propensity score matching and equity analysis study’.
Kevin Baker, Programme Coordinator, also presented a poster highlighting the work being done by the pneumonia diagnostics project team: ‘Pneumonia Diagnostics – searching for new tools for frontline health workers in resource-poor settings’. The poster outlined the various qualitative and quantitative research stages currently underway in four countries – Cambodia, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Uganda, and included initial qualitative results documenting the current enablers and constraints for community health workers detecting the signs of pneumonia in young children.