Promoting unity of purpose in district health service delivery in Uganda through partnerships, trust building and evidence-based decision-making.

CONTEXT: The Uganda Program for Human and Holistic Development (UPHOLD), a USAID-funded project which supports health services in 34 Ugandan districts, was conceived at a time when promising interventions could not be expanded due to fragmented systems. This paper focuses on how the program addressed fragmentation to improve service delivery in the health sector. APPROACH: UPHOLD achieved results by utilizing grants and technical support to strengthen capacity in a decentralized setting to foster institutional behavior change, promote strengthened partnerships among stakeholders in health, and produce increased transparency and accountability. In addition, the Lot Quality Assurance Sampling (LQAS) survey methodology was institutionalized to promote a culture of evidence-based decision-making at the district level. RESULTS: Evidence-based decision-making and partnership-oriented implementation led to programmatic results and institutional behavior change in districts through synergetic relationships between local governments and Civil Society Organizations. The use of Insecticide Treated Nets increased from 11.2% in 2004 to 17.2% in 2005, clients utilizing HIV/AIDS counselling and testing services increased from 6,205 in 2004 to 85 947 in 2005 and using Lot Quality Assurance Sampling methodology has begun to positively influence district and national staff mind sets leading to more evidence-based planning and decision-making. CONCLUSION: The pillars of 'evidence-based decision-making' and 'partnerships', together with approaches which strengthen existing synergies, produced more results, faster. Programs designed to work with fragmented settings should consider using the same pillars and blocks to ultimately make a difference in the lives of program beneficiaries.

Community participation in primary health care (PHC) programmes: lessons from tuberculosis treatment delivery in South Africa.

BACKGROUND: Currently, there is renewed interest in the role community participation can play in Primary Health Care (PHC) programmes such as the delivery of effective anti-TB treatment to patients in high-burden settings. OBJECTIVES: To explore the feasibility of community participation in a high-burden Tuberculosis Control Programme and to establish how supervision of treatment by lay volunteers compares with other methods of tuberculosis treatment delivery in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. METHODS: Prospective study involving 769 patients with confirmed pulmonary TB who were followed-up over a one-year period. Questionnaire interviews were also carried out with 135 lay volunteers participating in the TB programme. RESULTS: One-third of the TB patients in the study received their treatment from lay volunteers in the community. Treatment outcomes for new patients supervised from the community were found to be equivalent to those who received treatment through other modes of treatment delivery (RR=1.04[0.94-1.16], p=0.435). For the re-treatment patients, community-based treatment was found to be superior (RR=5.89[2.30-15.09], p<0.001), to self-administered therapy. CONCLUSIONS: Health care planners should consider community participation as a viable way of ensuring accessibility and effectiveness in PHC programmes. There is need for more research into ways of achieving sustainability in resource-limited but high disease burden settings.

Corporate response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Uganda - time for a paradigm shift?

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is likely to remain the pre-eminent global health concern for the foreseeable future. In Uganda, while significant progress has been made by the government over the past decade in bringing down the rate of new infections, the HIV/AIDS burden in the country remains huge and vigilant efforts must be continued if this burden is to further decrease. Traditionally the government, supported by its international partners as well as local non-government organizations and the community has borne the brunt of the costs of containing the epidemic in Uganda. While the corporate sector in the country has financially contributed towards the costs of some of the interventions that are currently in place to combat the HIV epidemic, there is largely a paucity of sustained and systematic corporate leadership in providing comprehensive HIV/AIDS programmes for their employees. A survey done by the authors of this paper reveals that most programmes undertaken in the private sector are of limited scope. We argue that there is more the corporate sector can do to more equitably share the HIV/AIDS burden, without necessarily jeopardizing its primary role - namely to maximize returns to shareholders. This paper proposes a conceptual framework of how companies can approach the issue of HIV/AIDS within their workforce and suggests that providing more comprehensive interventions may in some instances result in substantial cost savings through the prevention or at least delay of HIV/AIDS related consequences such as: frequent absences from work, erosion of company skills and knowledge through key employee deaths, and the costs of hiring and training replacements etc. This ultimately could result in positive financial returns to those companies that choose to pursue work place led HIV/AIDS control and prevention programmes.

Lay workers in directly observed treatment (DOT) programmes for tuberculosis in high burden settings: Should they be paid? A review of behavioural perspectives.

The current global tuberculosis (TB) epidemic has pressured health care managers, particularly in developing countries, to seek for alternative, innovative ways of delivering effective treatment to the large number of TB patients diagnosed annually. One strategy employed is direct observation of treatment (DOT) for all patients. In high-burden settings innovation with this strategy has resulted into the use of lay community members to supervise TB patients during the duration of anti-TB treatment. However, community involvement in health programmes is not a simple matter. There is often a need for continued motivation of community members in order to ensure sustainability of such projects. Lay workers may demand payment for work done particularly if this takes up a reasonable proportion of their time. TB treatment, by its very nature, lasts for a considerable period and this paper seeks to examine behavioural perspectives that attempt to address the issue of whether lay workers in such programmes should be paid for their services. The theories explored suggest intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as factors that lead people to volunteer for health programmes. Intrinsic motivation encompasses such feelings as empathy and altruism as well as other factors such as religious and cultural conviction. The authors argue however that in high-burden TB settings, these factors alone may be inadequate to provide continued motivation for lay worker involvement in health programmes. Extrinsic motivators, of which money is the strongest example, then also serve to keep sustained interest particularly in resource-limited settings where people expect payment for work done. The debate on whether lay workers in health programmes should be paid is thus compounded by issues such as what factors one believes are responsible for motivation in particular contextual settings; how long lay persons are expected to perform tasks at hand; the capacity that exists to pay them and the sustainability of the motivating option chosen. We recommend more qualitative research to be done on this issue in high TB burden settings.