Community &Monitoring &Treatment Bill Brieger | 12 Nov 2013 08:29 am
Community registers in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria track malaria treatment and integrated services
Below is the abstract for a poster being presented by a team from Jhpiego at the upcoming 62nd annual meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene November 13-17 2013 at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington DC. If you are at the conference, stop by poster number LB-2289 on Friday and discuss with Bright Orji.
Community Directed Distributors bring their registers to the nearby clinic for monthly supervision meetings
Community Directed Treated with Ivermectin (CDTI) for onchocerciasis successfully reached 100,000 African villages with locally selected volunteers known as Community Directed Distributors (CDDs). Recognizing CDTI’s potential other health programs added a variety of interventions to the work of CDDs. Jhpiego (an Affiliate of Johns Hopkins University) successfully engaged communities and their CDDs in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria to control malaria in pregnancy from 2007-11, and subsequently found the communities willing to expand into integrated community case management (ICCM) of malaria, diarrhoea and pneumonia. This report documents iCCM services given by CDDs.
The project mobilized 108 kin groups (100 +/- people) in 6 clinic catchment areas two Local Government Areas of the State. Each kin group selected 1-2 CDDs. Overall, 152 CDDs were trained by staff of local health centers. CDDs continued to provide intermittent preventive treatment of malaria in pregnancy using sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine and then added malaria rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs); Artemisinin-based Combination Therapy for positive RDT results; oral rehydration solution and zinc tablets for diarrhea, and cotrimoxazole for pneumonia.
Data were extracted one year’s information from a sample of 68 community registers by three health staff using a checklist. During the period 2,202 clients were seen by CDDs with ages ranging from infancy to adulthood. Overall 33.3% were treated for malaria, 20.3% for pneumonia and 7.8% for diarrhoea (a few had multiple problems). Among the client visits, 30.6% were for pregnant women receiving a dose of IPTp.
RDTs were used with 1550 clients (70.4%) who had suspected malaria and 44.1% were positive. The breakdown of the 734 treated for malaria was positive RDT (93.1%), negative RDT (2.2%) and no test (5.2%). Community registers have shown that volunteer CDDs can provide a variety of front line health services, and can fairly correctly follow malaria testing and treatment procedures.