Mentoring &mHealth &Training &Uncategorized Bill Brieger | 25 Nov 2019 05:49 am
mMentoring, a New Approach to Improve Malaria Care in Burkina Faso
Moumouni Bonkoungou,* Ousmane Badolo, Youssouf Sawadogo, Stanislas Nebie, Thierry Ouedraogo, Yacouba Sawadogo, William Brieger, Gladys Tetteh, and Blami Dao presented their work on “mMentoring, a New Approach to Improve Malaria Care in Burkina Faso” at the 68th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene as seen below.
Malaria is the leading cause of consultation (43.3%), hospitalization (44.1%) and death (16.1 %) in Burkina Faso. In the Sahel Region, the case fatality proportion due to malaria is 2% compared to 0.8% for the national average. This region is most affected by malaria than others. Also, the Sahel Region is currently experiencing high levels of insecurity making movement of health teams difficult and unsafe.
mMentoring is the use of mobile technology to ensure capacity building and continuing education among health staff. The process started by a workshop to develop messages, and briefing of the main actors.
Each week, messages and quizzes (An automatic answer is sent to each quiz) are sent to 753 providers (nurses, midwives, medical doctors) of the 115 health centers in the Sahel Region. Each month, messages are revised by a team at national level before being sent.
The messages sent were related to several key malaria prevention and control interventions, such as case definition, 
parasitological diagnosis, clinical case management of simple and severe cases, intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy (IPTp), pre-referral treatment with rectal artesunate in children under 5 years, insecticide-treated bed nets.
After 10 months of implementation, 64 
reinforcement messages on case management and prevention guideline and 63 quizzes were sent. Proportion of correct responses to the quizzes ranged from 43% and 96%. The lowest scores related to topics on management of severe cases while the highest were related to diagnosis of malaria.
The participation rate (number of respondents of the 753 targeted health workers) is on average 22% with 71% of participants from primary health facilities. Also, we notice IPT3 increased from 14.8% in the quarter 3 of 2017 to 45.6% in the same quarter of 2018 (with mMentoring).
The rate of performance of rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) rose from 67.5% to 77.8%. The case fatality rate during this quarter of 2017 was 3.3% and 1.8% in 2018. As a real platform for continuing training, it would be wise to extend this approach to other regions of the country and also to other health actors like community health workers.
*Affiliations: PMI Improving Malaria Care Project, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Ministry of Health, National Malaria Control Program, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States, Jhpiego Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, United States
on 25 Nov 2019 at 6:20 am 1.Tony said …
This are high Impact innovative approaches(mMentoring and Pre Refferal Rectal Artesunate at Community Level)in the fight against malaria that can be adapted and upscaled in other malaria endemic countries to Improve malaria case management and reduce malaria mortality.