Community &Drug Quality &Private Sector &Treatment Bill Brieger | 08 Oct 2014 03:54 pm
Registered drug shops are preferred for treating acute febrile illness in rural Uganda
The recently concluded Global Health Systems Research Symposium in Cape Town featured a number of abstracts that touched directly or indirectly on malaria. Malaria services and movement toward malaria elimination cannot be achieved in a country without a strong health system that involves both communities, program staff and policy makers.
Below is an abstract by Freddy Kitutu, Chrispus Mayora, Phyllis Awor, Forsberg Birger, Stefan Peterson, and Henry Wamani of Makerere University and the Karolinska Institute on use of medicine shops in Uganda.
“Under-five child mortality in Uganda is still high and majority is caused by easily treatable pneumonia, malaria and diarrhoeal diseases among the poorest people. One of the reasons for these deaths is the lack of timely access to proven life saving medicines. This hinders progress towards attainment of MDG 4 target by 2015.
“To increase access to quality medicines and diagnostics for child febrile illnesses, Makerere University School of Public Health (MakSPH) in collaboration with WHO Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, is doing a project to assess the potential to deliver quality integrated care for malaria, pneumonia and diarrhoea using integrated community case management (iCCM) strategies and tools. Hence, an assessment was conducted to determine baseline care seeking preferences.
“A baseline household survey interviewed caregivers of children under-five years. The study protocol and data collection tools had been reviewed and approved by Research and Ethics Committees at WHO, MakSPH and Uganda National Council of Science and Technology.
“A total of 2606 households were surveyed. The main childhood diseases reported included fever (70%), cough (77%), and diarrhoea (40%) convulsions (16%) Most households use private drug shops to purchase medicines to manage these illnesses. Use of drug shops was attributed to long distances to public health facilities, availability and reliability of drug stocks at drug shops, perceived high quality of services, and options for credit.
“Interventions that target public health facilities are likely to miss many healthcare seekers especially the poor in rural distant areas. Conclusion: Drug shops are the convenient and preferred outlets for rural poor communities, and therefore need to be included in interventions such as iCCM strategy.
“Significance for the selected field-building dimension: This abstract presents findings from the baseline assessment prior to introducing a health system intervention in drug shops to improve access to and quality of care for under-five children.”