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 Full Title Expanded Quality Management Using Information Power to improve maternal and new-born health in Tanzania and Uganda.
 Short Title EQUIP
 Project Leader Godfrey Mbaruku
 Description Maternal and new-born MDGs 4 and 5 will likely not be met in Africa despite the availability of evidence-based, affordable and appropriate technical interventions.  Obstacles persist on both the demand side (low utilization) and supply side (low quality and lack of services), across the continuum of care from pregnancy to postnatal care.  Priority must now be given to finding the mechanisms to bridge the "know-do gap".  Potential solutions include quality management and community involvement, where both approaches benefit from continuous, locally available, high-quality health information.

We propose an innovative intervention in Tanzania and Uganda to improve maternal and new-born health with an expanded health system quality management approach that links communities and facilities using locally generated data.  We will use Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles at community, health facility and district level powered by information from continuous multipurpose community and health facility surveys, with results presented in audience-specific report cards.  In each country, we will use a plausibility design to evaluate health and quality outcomes in intervention and control districts, each covering 20-30 health facilities and their catchment populations in Tanzania and Uganda.  Cost and community effectiveness of this intervention will be estimated with population and facility level indicators.  Changes in on textual factors will be carefully documented to enhance our understanding of how health improvements were achieved.  The impact on mortality will be modeled using the Lives Saved Tool.

Policy makers will contribute to reaching the MDGs 4 and 5 in Africa.  Furthermore, the intervention could serve as a more general model of scaling-up quality management of other health interventions in low-resource settings.  
 Collaborators Jennifer Jaribu                    Ifakara Health Centre (IHI) 

Fatuma Manzi                     Ifakara Health Institute (IHI)                 

 Source of funding European Union (EU)
 Start Date November 2010                    End Date     October 2014
     

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