Posts or Comments 29 March 2024

Community &Treatment Bill Brieger | 05 Mar 2015 08:52 am

Fighting Malaria with Community Case Management (CCM) Scale-Up in Kenya

Arianna Hutcheson has posted the following blog on our course website – Social and Behavioral Foundations of Primary Health Care

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Source: https://www.ifrc.org/Global/Publications/Health/Beyond_Prevention_HMM%20Malaria-EN.pdf

Access to health services is particularly difficult for the poor and those in more inaccessible areas of Kenya. This lack of endemic disease treatment for communities has proven to be quite deadly. With more than 11.3 million cases recorded annually, malaria is the leading killer of children under five years of age in Kenya. CCM, supported by organizations such as WHO and UNICEF, allows Kenya to effectively fight Malaria by using evidence-based life saving treatments that increase the availability and quality of proven interventions.

Using a CCM strategy has shown to decrease under-five malaria mortality by 60% overall under-five mortality by 40%. In Kenya particularly, the CCM pilot program has generated convincing results as seen in the graphic below.

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Access to Artemisinin-based Combination Therapy (ACT)  has increased and the education of communities provided by health workers has improved treatment seeking behavior. While the pilot CCM program is an important step to combating malaria, we are in the right time to take the success of this program and implement it country-wide.

Most importantly, CCM is part of the National Malaria Strategy, but it requires a more pronounced place in the plan to implement the successes of the pilot program in all 8 districts.

Action Needed: The Kenyan Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation (MoPHS) needs to commit and push ahead their own stated agenda for putting community health first by integrating malaria treatment into the already implemented diarrhea CCM program by the end of 2015.

Graphic: https://www.ifrc.org/Global/Publications/Health/Beyond_Prevention_HMM%20Malaria-EN.pdf

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