Causes of death and predictors of childhood mortality in Rwanda: a matched case-control study using verbal social autopsy.

BACKGROUND: Rwanda has dramatically reduced child mortality, but the causes and sociodemographic drivers for mortality are poorly understood. METHODS: We conducted a matched case-control study of all children who died before 5 years of age in eastern Rwanda between 1st March 2013 and 28th February 2014 to identify causes and risk factors for death. We identified deaths at the facility level and via a community health worker reporting system. We used verbal social autopsy to interview caregivers of deceased children and controls matched by area and age. We used InterVA4 to determine probable causes of death and cause-specific mortality fractions, and utilized conditional logistic regression to identify clinical, family, and household risk factors for death. RESULTS: We identified 618 deaths including 174 (28.2%) in neonates and 444 (71.8%) in non-neonates. The most commonly identified causes of death were pneumonia, birth asphyxia, and meningitis among neonates and malaria, acute respiratory infections, and HIV/AIDS-related death among non-neonates. Among neonates, 54 (31.0%) deaths occurred at home and for non-neonates 242 (54.5%) deaths occurred at home. Factors associated with neonatal death included home birth (aOR: 2.0; 95% CI: 1.4-2.8), multiple gestation (aOR: 2.1; 95% CI: 1.3-3.5), both parents deceased (aOR: 4.7; 95% CI: 1.5-15.3), mothers non-use of family planning (aOR: 0.8; 95% CI: 0.6-1.0), lack of accompanying person (aOR: 1.6; 95% CI: 1.1-2.1), and a caregiver who assessed the medical services they received as moderate to poor (aOR: 1.5; 95% CI: 1.2-1.9). Factors associated with non-neonatal deaths included multiple gestation (aOR: 2.8; 95% CI: 1.7-4.8), lack of adequate vaccinations (aOR: 1.7; 95% CI: 1.2-2.3), household size (aOR: 1.2; 95% CI: 1.0-1.4), maternal education levels (aOR: 1.9; 95% CI: 1.2-3.1), mothers non-use of family planning (aOR: 1.6; 95% CI: 1.4-1.8), and lack of household electricity (aOR: 1.4; 95% CI: 1.0-1.8). CONCLUSION: In the context of rapidly declining childhood mortality in Rwanda and increased access to health care, we found a large proportion of remaining deaths occur at home, with home deliveries still representing a significant risk factor for neonatal death. The major causes of death at a population level remain largely avoidable communicable diseases. Household characteristics associated with death included well-established socioeconomic and care-seeking risk factors.

Going beyond incentivizing formal health providers: Evidence from the Rwanda Community Performance-Based Financing program.

Pay-for-performance programs are introduced in an increasing number of low- and middle-income countries with the goal of reducing maternal and child mortality and morbidity through increased health service utilization and quality. Although most programs incentivize formal health providers, some constraints to utilization might be better alleviated by incentivizing other actors in the health care system. This paper presents results from a randomized controlled trial set to evaluate the effects of two incentive schemes that were introduced on top of Rwanda's national Performance-Based Financing program at the health facility level. One scheme rewarded community health worker cooperatives for the utilization of five services by their communities. The second scheme provided in-kind transfers to users of three services. The analysis finds no impact of the cooperative performance payments on coverage of the targeted services, behaviors of community health workers, or outcomes at the cooperative level. Although health centers experienced frequent stock outs of the gifts, the demand-side intervention significantly increased timely antenatal care by 9.3 percentage points and timely postnatal care by 8.6 percentage points. This study shows that demand-side incentives can increase service utilization also when provided in addition to a supply-side pay-for-performance scheme.

Balancing workload, motivation and job satisfaction in Rwanda: assessing the effect of adding family planning service provision to community health worker duties.

BACKGROUND: Task shifting from higher cadre providers to CHWs has been widely adopted to address healthcare provider shortages, but the addition of any service can potentially add to an already considerable workload for CHWs. Objective measures of workload alone, such as work-related time and travel may not reflect howCHWs actually perceive and react to their circumstances. This study combined perception and objectivemeasures of workload to examine their effect on quality of services, worker performance, and job and clientsatisfaction. METHODS: Three hundred eighty-three CHWs from control and intervention districts, where the intervention group was trained to provide contraceptive resupply, completed diaries of work-related activities for one month. Interviews were also conducted with a subset of CHWs and their clients. RESULTS: CHW diaries did not reveal significant differences between intervention and control groups in time spent on service provision or travel. Over 90% of CHWs reported workload manageability, job satisfaction, and motivation to perform their jobs. Clients were highly satisfied with CHW services and most stated preference for future services from CHWs. CONCLUSION: The study demonstrated that adding resupply of hormonal contraceptives to CHWs' tasks would not place undue burden on them. Accordingly, the initiative was scaled up in all 30 districts in the country.

Successive introduction of four new vaccines in Rwanda: High coverage and rapid scale up of Rwanda's expanded immunization program from 2009 to 2013.

As the pace of vaccine uptake accelerates globally, there is a need to document low-income country experiences with vaccine introductions. Over the course of five years, the government of Rwanda rolled out vaccines against pneumococcus, human papillomavirus, rotavirus, and measles & rubella, achieving over 90% coverage for each. To carry out these rollouts, Rwanda's Ministry of Health engaged in careful review of disease burden information and extensive, cross-sectoral planning at least one year before introducing each vaccine. Rwanda's local leaders, development partners, civil society organizations and widespread community health worker network were mobilized to support communication efforts. Community health workers were also used to confirm target population size. Support from Gavi, UNICEF and WHO was used in combination with government funds to promote country ownership and collaboration. Vaccination was also combined with additional community-based health interventions. Other countries considering rapid consecutive or simultaneous rollouts of new vaccines may consider lessons from Rwanda's experience while tailoring the strategies used to local context.

Data for Program Management: An Accuracy Assessment of Data Collected in Household Registers by Community Health Workers in Southern Kayonza, Rwanda.

Community health workers (CHWs) collect data for routine services, surveys and research in their communities. However, quality of these data is largely unknown. Utilizing poor quality data can result in inefficient resource use, misinformation about system gaps, and poor program management and effectiveness. This study aims to measure CHW data accuracy, defined as agreement between household registers compared to household member interview and client records in one district in Eastern province, Rwanda. We used cluster-lot quality assurance sampling to randomly sample six CHWs per cell and six households per CHW. We classified cells as having 'poor' or 'good' accuracy for household registers for five indicators, calculating point estimates of percent of households with accurate data by health center. We evaluated 204 CHW registers and 1,224 households for accuracy across 34 cells in southern Kayonza. Point estimates across health centers ranged from 79 to 100% for individual indicators and 61 to 72% for the composite indicator. Recording error appeared random for all but the widely under-reported number of women on modern family planning method. Overall, accuracy was largely 'good' across cells, with varying results by indicator. Program managers should identify optimum thresholds for 'good' data quality and interventions to reach them according to data use. Decreasing variability and improving quality will facilitate potential of these routinely-collected data to be more meaningful for community health program management. We encourage further studies assessing CHW data quality and the impact training, supervision and other strategies have on improving it.

Rwanda 20 years on: investing in life.

Two decades ago, the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda led to the deaths of 1 million people, and the displacement of millions more. Injury and trauma were followed by the effects of a devastated health system and economy. In the years that followed, a new course set by a new government set into motion equity-oriented national policies focusing on social cohesion and people-centred development. Premature mortality rates have fallen precipitously in recent years, and life expectancy has doubled since the mid-1990s. Here we reflect on the lessons learned in rebuilding Rwanda's health sector during the past two decades, as the country now prepares itself to take on new challenges in health-care delivery.

Shared learning in an interconnected world: innovations to advance global health equity.

The notion of "reverse innovation"--that some insights from low-income countries might offer transferable lessons for wealthier contexts--is increasingly common in the global health and business strategy literature. Yet the perspectives of researchers and policymakers in settings where these innovations are developed have been largely absent from the discussion to date. In this Commentary, we present examples of programmatic, technological, and research-based innovations from Rwanda, and offer reflections on how the global health community might leverage innovative partnerships for shared learning and improved health outcomes in all countries.

Integration of comprehensive women's health programmes into health systems: cervical cancer prevention, care and control in Rwanda.

PROBLEM: Although it is highly preventable and treatable, cervical cancer is the most common and most deadly cancer among women in Rwanda. APPROACH: By mobilizing a diverse coalition of partnerships, Rwanda became the first country in Africa to develop and implement a national strategic plan for cervical cancer prevention, screening and treatment. LOCAL SETTING: Rwanda - a small, landlocked nation in East Africa with a population of 10.4 million - is well positioned to tackle a number of "high-burden" noncommunicable diseases. The country's integrated response to infectious diseases has resulted in steep declines in premature mortality over the past decade. RELEVANT CHANGES: In 2011-2012, Rwanda vaccinated 227,246 girls with all three doses of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. Among eligible girls, three-dose coverage rates of 93.2% and 96.6% were achieved in 2011 and 2012, respectively. The country has also initiated nationwide screening and treatment programmes that are based on visual inspection of the cervix with acetic acid, testing for HPV DNA, cryotherapy, the loop electrosurgical excision procedure and various advanced treatment options. LESSONS LEARNT: Low-income countries should begin to address cervical cancer by integrating prevention, screening and treatment into routine women's health services. This requires political will, cross-sectoral collaboration and planning, innovative partnerships and robust monitoring and evaluation. With external support and adequate planning, high nationwide coverage rates for HPV vaccination and screening for cervical cancer can be achieved within a few years.

Utilizing community health worker data for program management and evaluation: systems for data quality assessments and baseline results from Rwanda.

Community health workers (CHWs) have and continue to play a pivotal role in health services delivery in many resource-constrained environments. The data routinely generated through these programs are increasingly relied upon for providing information for program management, evaluation and quality assurance. However, there are few published results on the quality of CHW-generated data, and what information exists suggests quality is low. An ongoing challenge is the lack of routine systems for CHW data quality assessments (DQAs). In this paper, we describe a system developed for CHW DQAs and results of the first formal assessment in southern Kayonza, Rwanda, May-June 2011. We discuss considerations for other programs interested in adopting such systems. While the results identified gaps in the current data quality, the assessment also identified opportunities for strengthening the data to ensure suitable levels of quality for use in management and evaluation.