Hospital readiness for the provision of care to critically ill patients in Tanzania- an in-depth cross-sectional study.

BACKGROUND: Critical illness is a state of ill health with vital organ dysfunction, a high risk of imminent death if care is not provided and potential for reversibility. The burden of critical illness is high, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Critical care can be provided as Essential Emergency and Critical Care (EECC)- the effective, low-cost, basic care that all critically ill patients should receive in all parts of all hospitals in the world- and advanced critical care- complex, resource-intensive care usually provided in an intensive care unit. The required resources may be available in the hospital and yet not be ready in the wards for immediate use for critically ill patients. The ward readiness of these resources, although harder to evaluate, is likely more important than their availability in the hospital. This study aimed to assess the ward readiness for EECC and the hospital availability of resources for EECC and for advanced critical care in hospitals in Tanzania. METHODS: An in-depth, cross-sectional study was conducted in five purposively selected hospitals by visiting all wards to collect data on all the required 66 EECC and 161 advanced critical care resources. We defined hospital-availability as a resource present in the hospital and ward-readiness as a resource available, functioning, and present in the right place, time and amounts for critically ill patient care in the wards. Data were analyzed to calculate availability and readiness scores as proportions of the resources that were available at hospital level, and ready at ward level respectively. RESULTS: Availability of EECC resources in hospitals was 84% and readiness in the wards was 56%. District hospitals had lower readiness scores (less than 50%) than regional and tertiary hospitals. Equipment readiness was highest (65%) while that of guidelines lowest (3%). Availability of advanced critical care resources was 31%. CONCLUSION: Hospitals in Tanzania lack readiness for the provision of EECC- the low-cost, life-saving care for critically ill patients. The resources for EECC were available in hospitals, but were not ready for the immediate needs of critically ill patients in the wards. To provide effective EECC to all patients, improvements are needed around the essential, low-cost resources in hospital wards that are essential for decreasing preventable deaths.

Health care workers' experiences of calling-for-help when taking care of critically ill patients in hospitals in Tanzania and Kenya.

BACKGROUND: When caring for critically ill patients, health workers often need to 'call-for-help' to get assistance from colleagues in the hospital. Systems are required to facilitate calling-for-help and enable the timely provision of care for critically ill patients. Evidence around calling-for-help systems is mostly from high income countries and the state of calling-for-help in hospitals in Tanzania and Kenya has not been formally studied. This study aims to describe health workers' experiences about calling-for-help when taking care of critically ill patients in hospitals in Tanzania and Kenya. METHODS: Ten hospitals across Kenya and Tanzania were visited and in-depth interviews conducted with 30 health workers who had experience of caring for critically ill patients. The interviews were transcribed, translated and the data thematically analyzed. RESULTS: The study identified three thematic areas concerning the systems for calling-for-help when taking care of critically ill patients: 1) Calling-for-help structures: there is lack of functioning structures for calling-for-help; 2) Calling-for-help processes: the calling-for-help processes are innovative and improvised; and 3) Calling-for-help outcomes: the help that is provided is not as requested. CONCLUSION: Calling-for-help when taking care of a critically ill patient is a necessary life-saving part of care, but health workers in Tanzanian and Kenyan hospitals experience a range of significant challenges. Hospitals lack functioning structures, processes for calling-for-help are improvised and help that is provided is not as requested. These challenges likely cause delays and decrease the quality of care, potentially resulting in unnecessary mortality and morbidity.

Perspectives and practices of health workers around diagnosis of paediatric tuberculosis in hospitals in a resource-poor setting - modern diagnostics meet age-old challenges.

BACKGROUND: Detection of tuberculosis (TB) in children in Kenya is sub-optimal. Xpert MTB/RIF® assay (Xpert®) has the potential to improve speed of TB diagnosis due to its sensitivity and fast turnaround for results. Significant effort and resources have been put into making the machines widely available in Kenya, but use remains low, especially in children. We set out to explore the reasons for the under-detection of TB and underuse of Xpert® in children, identifying challenges that may be relevant to other newer diagnostics in similar settings. METHODS: This was an exploratory qualitative study with an embedded case study approach. Data collection involved semi-structured interviews; small-group discussions; key informant interviews; observations of TB trainings, sensitisation meetings, policy meetings, hospital practices; desk review of guidelines, job aides and policy documents. The Capability, Opportunity and Motivation (COM-B) framework was used to interpret emerging themes. RESULTS: At individual level, knowledge, skill, competence and experience, as well as beliefs and fears impacted on capability (physical & psychological) as well as motivation (reflective) to diagnose TB in children and use diagnostic tests. Hospital level influencers included hospital norms, processes, patient flows and resources which affected how individual health workers attempted to diagnose TB in children by impacting on their capability (physical & psychological), motivation (reflective & automatic) and opportunity (physical & social). At the wider system level, community practices and beliefs, and implementation of TB programme directives impacted some of the decisions that health workers made through capability (psychological), motivation (reflective & automatic) and opportunity (physical). CONCLUSION: We used comprehensive approaches to identify influencers of TB case detection and use of TB diagnostic tests in children in Kenya. These results are being used to design a contextually-appropriate intervention to improve TB diagnosis, which may be relevant to similar low-resource, high TB burden countries and can be feasibly implemented by the National TB programme.

Vaccines to prevent pneumonia in children - a developing country perspective.

Pneumonia accounted for 15% of the 6.3 million deaths among children younger than five years in 2013, a total of approximately 935,000 deaths worldwide. Routine vaccination against common childhood illnesses has been identified as one of the most cost-effective strategies to prevent death from pneumonia. Vaccine-preventable or potentially preventable diseases commonly linked with respiratory tract infections include Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenza type-b (Hib), pertussis, influenza, measles, and tuberculosis. Although here have been great strides in the development and administration of effective vaccines, the countries that carry the largest disease burdens still struggle to vaccinate their children and newer conjugated vaccines remain out of reach for many. The Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP) has identified priority areas for innovation in research in all aspects of immunisation development and delivery to ensure equitable access to vaccines for all.

Building Learning Health Systems to Accelerate Research and Improve Outcomes of Clinical Care in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.

Mike English and colleagues argue that as efforts are made towards achieving universal health coverage it is also important to build capacity to develop regionally relevant evidence to improve healthcare.

Oral amoxicillin versus benzyl penicillin for severe pneumonia among kenyan children: a pragmatic randomized controlled noninferiority trial.

BACKGROUND: There are concerns that the evidence from studies showing noninferiority of oral amoxicillin to benzyl penicillin for severe pneumonia may not be generalizable to high-mortality settings. METHODS: An open-label, multicenter, randomized controlled noninferiority trial was conducted at 6 Kenyan hospitals. Eligible children aged 2-59 months were randomized to receive amoxicillin or benzyl penicillin and followed up for the primary outcome of treatment failure at 48 hours. A noninferiority margin of risk difference between amoxicillin and benzyl penicillin groups was prespecified at 7%. RESULTS: We recruited 527 children, including 302 (57.3%) with comorbidity. Treatment failure was observed in 20 of 260 (7.7%) and 21 of 261 (8.0%) of patients in the amoxicillin and benzyl penicillin arms, respectively (risk difference, -0.3% [95% confidence interval, -5.0% to 4.3%]) in per-protocol analyses. These findings were supported by the results of intention-to-treat analyses. Treatment failure by day 5 postenrollment was 11.4% and 11.0% and rising to 13.5% and 16.8% by day 14 in the amoxicillin vs benzyl penicillin groups, respectively. The most frequent cause of cumulative treatment failure at day 14 was clinical deterioration within 48 hours of enrollment (33/59 [55.9%]). Four patients died (overall mortality 0.8%) during the study, 3 of whom were allocated to the benzyl penicillin group. The presence of wheeze was independently associated with less frequent treatment failure. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings confirm noninferiority of amoxicillin to benzyl penicillin, provide estimates of risk of treatment failure in Kenya, and offer important additional evidence for policy making in sub-Saharan Africa. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: NCT01399723.

Third delay in care of critically ill patients: a qualitative investigation of public hospitals in Kenya.

OBJECTIVES: Third delay refers to delays in delivering requisite care to patients after they arrive at a health facility. In low-resource care settings, effective triage and flow of care are difficult to guarantee. In this study, we aimed to identify delays in the delivery of care to critically ill patients and possible ways to address these delays. DESIGN: This was an exploratory qualitative study using in-depth interviews and patient journeys. The qualitative data were transcribed and aggregated into themes in NVivo V.12 Plus using inductive and deductive approaches. SETTING: This study was conducted in four secondary-level public Kenyan hospitals across four counties between March and December 2021. The selected hospitals were part of the Clinical Information Network. PARTICIPANTS: Purposive sampling method was used to identify administrative and front-line healthcare providers and patients. We conducted 12 in-depth interviews with 11 healthcare workers and patient journeys of 7 patients. Informed consent was sought from the participants and maintained throughout the study. RESULTS: We identified a cycle of suboptimal systems for care with adaptive mechanisms that prevent quality care to critically ill patients. We identified suboptimal systems for identification of critical illness, inadequate resources for continuity care and disruption of the flow of care, as the major causes of delays in identification and the initiation of essential care to critically ill patients. Our study also illuminated the contribution of inflexible bureaucratic non-clinical business-related organisational processes to third delay. CONCLUSION: Eliminating or reducing delays after patients arrive at the hospital is a time-sensitive measure that could improve the care outcomes of critically ill patients. This is achievable through an essential emergency and critical care package within the hospitals. Our findings can help emphasise the need for standardised effective and reliable care priorities to maintain of care of critically ill patients.

COVID-19 and unintended steps towards further equity in global health research.

There was, and possibly still is, potential for COVID-19 to disrupt power inequities and contribute to positive transformation in global health research that increases equity. While there is consensus about the need to decolonise by transforming global health, and a roadmap outlining how we could approach it, there are few examples of steps that could be taken to transform the mechanics of global health research. This paper contributes lessons learnt from experiences and reflections of our diverse multinational team of researchers involved in a multicountry research project. We demonstrate the positive impact on our research project of making further steps towards improving equity within our research practices. Some of the approaches adopted include redistributing power to researchers from the countries of interest at various stages in their career, by involving the whole team in decisions about the research; meaningfully involving the whole team in research data analysis; and providing opportunities for all researchers from the countries of interest to voice their perspectives as first authors in publications. Although this approach is consistent with how research guidance suggests research should be run, in reality it does not often happen in this way. The authors of this paper hope that by sharing our experience, we can contribute towards discussions about the processes required to continue developing a global health sector that is equitable and inclusive.

Same label, different patients: Health-workers' understanding of the label 'critical illness'.

Background: During the course of patients' sickness, some become critically ill, and identifying them is the first important step to be able to manage the illness. During the course of care provision, health workers sometimes use the term 'critical illness' as a label when referring to their patient's condition, and the label is then used as a basis for communication and care provision. Their understanding of this label will therefore have a profound impact on the identification and management of patients. This study aimed to determine how Kenyan and Tanzanian health workers understand the label 'critical illness'. Methods: A total of 10 hospitals-five in Kenya and five in Tanzania-were visited. In-depth interviews were conducted with 30 nurses and physicians from different departments in the hospitals who had experience in providing care for sick patients. We conducted a thematic analysis of the translated and transcribed interviews, synthesized findings and developed an overarching set of themes which captured healthcare workers' understandings of the label 'critical illness'. Results: Overall, there does not appear to be a unified understanding of the label 'critical illness' among health workers. Health workers understand the label to refer to patients in four thematic ways: (1) those in a life-threatening state; (2) those with certain diagnoses; (3) those receiving care in certain locations; and (4) those in need of a certain level of care. Conclusion: There is a lack of a unified understanding about the label 'critical illness' among health workers in Tanzania and Kenya. This potentially hampers communication and the selection of patients for urgent life-saving care. A recently proposed definition, "a state of ill health with vital organ dysfunction, a high risk of imminent death if care is not provided and the potential for reversibility", could be useful for improving communication and care.

Hospital care for critical illness in low-resource settings: lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Care for the critically ill patients is often considered synonymous with a hospital having an intensive care unit. However, a focus on Essential Emergency and Critical Care (EECC) may obviate the need for much intensive care. Severe COVID-19 presented a specific critical care challenge while also being an exemplar of critical illness in general. Our multidisciplinary team conducted research in Kenya and Tanzania on hospitals' ability to provide EECC as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. Important basic inputs were often lacking, especially sufficient numbers of skilled health workers. However, we learnt that higher scores on resource readiness scales were often misleading, as resources were often insufficient or not functional in all the clinical areas they are needed. By following patient journeys, through interviews and group discussions, we revealed gaps in timeliness, continuity and delivery of care. Generic challenges in transitions between departments were identified in the receipt of critically ill patients, the ability to sustain monitoring and treatment and preparation for any subsequent transition. While the global response to COVID-19 focused initially on providing technologies and training, first ventilators and later oxygen, organisational and procedural challenges seemed largely ignored. Yet, they may even be exacerbated by new technologies. Efforts to improve care for the critically ill patients, which is a complex process, must include a whole system and whole facility view spanning all areas of patients' care and their transitions and not be focused on a single location providing 'critical care'. We propose a five-part strategy to support the system changes needed.

Receive, Sustain, and Flow: A simple heuristic for facilitating the identification and treatment of critically ill patients during their hospital journeys.

Background: Hospital patients can become critically ill anywhere in a hospital but their survival is affected by problems of identification and adequate, timely, treatment. This is issue of particular concern in lower middle-income countries' (LMICs) hospitals where specialised units are scarce and severely under-resourced. "Cross-sectional" approaches to improving narrow, specific aspects of care will not attend to issues that affect patients' care across the length of their experience. A simpler approach to understanding key issues across the "hospital journey" could help to deliver life-saving treatments to those patients who need it, wherever they are in the facility. Methods: We carried out 31 narrative interviews with frontline health workers in five Kenyan and five Tanzanian hospitals from November 2020 to December 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic and analysed using a thematic analysis approach. We also followed 12 patient hospital journeys, through the course of treatment of very sick patients admitted to the hospitals we studied. Results: Our research explores gaps in hospital systems that result in lapses in effective, continuous care across the hospital journeys of patients in Tanzania and Kenya. We organise these factors according to the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) approach to patient safety, which we extend to explore how these issues affect patients across the course of care. We discern three repeating, recursive phases we term Receive, Sustain, and Flow. We use this heuristic to show how gaps and weaknesses in service provision affect critically ill patients' hospital journeys. Conclusion: Receive, Sustain, and Flow offers a heuristic for hospital management to identify and ameliorate limitations in human and technical resources for the care of the critically ill.

Policies and resources for strengthening of emergency and critical care services in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic in Kenya.

Critical illnesses cause several million deaths annually, with many of these occurring in low-resource settings like Kenya. Great efforts have been made worldwide to scale up critical care to reduce deaths from COVID-19. Lower income countries with fragile health systems may not have had sufficient resources to upscale their critical care. We aimed to review how efforts to strengthen emergency and critical care were operationalised during the pandemic in Kenya to point towards how future emergencies should be approached. This was an exploratory study that involved document reviews, and discussions with key stakeholders (donors, international agencies, professional associations, government actors), during the first year of the pandemic in Kenya. Our findings suggest that pre-pandemic health services for the critically ill in Kenya were sparse and unable to meet rising demand, with major limitations noted in human resources and infrastructure. The pandemic response saw galvanised action by the Government of Kenya and other agencies to mobilise resources (approximately USD 218 million). Earlier efforts were largely directed towards advanced critical care but since the human resource gap could not be reduced immediately, a lot of equipment remained unused. We also note that despite strong policies on what resources should be available, the reality on the ground was that there were often critical shortages. While emergency response mechanisms are not conducive to addressing long-term health system issues, the pandemic increased global recognition of the need to fund care for the critically ill. Limited resources may be best prioritised towards a public health approach with focus on provision of relatively basic, lower cost essential emergency and critical care (EECC) that can potentially save the most lives amongst critically ill patients.

The hidden emotional labour behind ensuring the social value of research: Experiences of frontline health policy and systems researchers based in Kenya during COVID-19.

Health policy and systems research (HPSR) is a multi-disciplinary, largely applied field of research aimed at understanding and strengthening the performance of health systems, often with an emphasis on power, policy and equity. The value of embedded and participatory HPSR specifically in facilitating the collection of rich data that is relevant to addressing real-world challenges is increasingly recognised. However, the potential contributions and challenges of HPSR in the context of shocks and crises are not well documented, with a particular gap in the literature being the experiences and coping strategies of the HPSR researchers who are embedded in health systems in resource constrained settings. In this paper, we draw on two sets of group discussions held among a group of approximately 15 HPSR researchers based in Nairobi, Kenya, who were conducting a range of embedded HPSR studies throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers, including many of the authors, were employed by the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme (KWTRP), which is a long-standing multi-disciplinary partnership between the Kenya Medical Research Institute and the Wellcome Trust with a central goal of contributing to national and international health policy and practice. We share our findings in relation to three inter-related themes: 1) Ensuring the continued social value of our HPSR work in the face of changing priorities; 2) Responding to shifting ethical procedures and processes at institutional and national levels; and 3) Protecting our own and front-line colleagues' well-being, including clinical colleagues. Our experiences highlight that in navigating research work and responsibilities to colleagues, patients and participants through the pandemic, many embedded HPSR staff faced difficult emotional and ethical challenges, including heightened forms of moral distress, which may have been better prevented and supported. We draw on our findings and the wider literature to discuss considerations for funders and research leads with an eye to strengthening support for embedded HPSR staff, not only in crises such as the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, but also more generally.

A systematic review of clinical, epidemiological and demographic predictors of tuberculosis in children with pneumonia.

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) can present as acute, severe pneumonia in children, but features which distinguish TB from other causes of pneumonia are not well understood. We conducted a systematic review to determine the prevalence and to explore clinical and demographic predictors of TB in children presenting with pneumonia over three decades. Methods: We searched for peer-reviewed, English language studies published between 1990 and 2020 that included children aged between 1 month and 17 years with pneumonia and prospectively evaluated for TB. There were 895 abstracts and titles screened, and 72 full text articles assessed for eligibility. Results: Thirteen clinical studies, two autopsy studies and one systematic review were included in analyses. Majority of studies were from Africa (12/15) and included children less than five years age. Prevalence of bacteriologically confirmed TB in children with pneumonia ranged from 0.2% to 14.8% (median = 3.7%, interquartile range (IQR) = 5.95) and remained stable over the three decades. TB may be more likely in children with pneumonia if they have a history of close TB contact, HIV infection, malnutrition, age less than one year or failure to respond to empirical antibiotics. However, these features have limited discriminatory value as TB commonly presents as acute severe pneumonia - with a short duration of cough, and clinical and radiographic features indistinguishable from other causes of pneumonia. Approximately half of patients with TB respond to initial empirical antibiotics, presumably due to bacterial co-infection, and follow-up may be critical to detect and treat TB. Conclusion: TB should be considered as a potential cause or comorbidity in all children presenting with pneumonia in high burden settings. Clinicians should be alert to the presence of known risk factors for TB and bacteriological confirmation sought whenever possible. Quality data regarding clinical predictors of TB in childhood pneumonia are lacking. Further, prospective research is needed to better understand predictors and prevalence of TB in childhood pneumonia, particularly in TB endemic settings outside of Africa and in older children. Children of all ages with pneumonia should be included in research on improved, point-of-care TB diagnostics to support early case detection and treatment.

Diagnostic Challenges in Childhood Pulmonary Tuberculosis-Optimizing the Clinical Approach.

The management of childhood tuberculosis (TB) is hampered by the low sensitivity and limited accessibility of microbiological testing. Optimizing clinical approaches is therefore critical to close the persistent gaps in TB case detection and prevention necessary to realize the child mortality targets of the End TB Strategy. In this review, we provide practical guidance summarizing the evidence and guidelines describing the use of symptoms and signs in decision making for children being evaluated for either TB preventive treatment (TPT) or TB disease treatment in high-TB incidence settings. Among at-risk children being evaluated for TPT, a symptom screen may be used to differentiate children who require further investigation for TB disease before receiving TPT. For symptomatic children being investigated for TB disease, an algorithmic approach can inform which children should receive TB treatment, even in the absence of imaging or microbiological confirmation. Though clinical approaches have limitations in accuracy, they are readily available and can provide valuable guidance for decision making in resource-limited settings to increase treatment access. We discuss the trade-offs in using them to make TB treatment decisions.

Improving facility-based care: eliciting tacit knowledge to advance intervention design.

Attention has turned to improving the quality and safety of healthcare within health facilities to reduce avoidable mortality and morbidity. Interventions should be tested in health system environments that can support their adoption if successful. To be successful, interventions often require changes in multiple behaviours making their consequences unpredictable. Here, we focus on this challenge of change at the mesolevel or microlevel. Drawing on multiple insights from theory and our own empirical work, we highlight the importance of engaging managers, senior and frontline staff and potentially patients to explore foundational questions examining three core resource areas. These span the physical or material resources available, workforce capacity and capability and team and organisational relationships. Deficits in all these resource areas may need to be addressed to achieve success. We also argue that as inertia is built into the complex social and human systems characterising healthcare facilities that thought on how to mobilise five motive forces is needed to help achieve change. These span goal alignment and ownership, leadership for change, empowering key actors, promoting responsive planning and procurement and learning for transformation. Our aim is to bridge the theory-practice gap and offer an entry point for practical discussions to elicit the critical tacit and contextual knowledge needed to design interventions. We hope that this may improve the chances that interventions are successful and so contribute to better facility-based care and outcomes while contributing to the development of learning health systems.

Employing learning health system principles to advance research on severe neonatal and paediatric illness in Kenya.

We have worked to develop a Clinical Information Network (CIN) in Kenya as an early form of learning health systems (LHS) focused on paediatric and neonatal care that now spans 22 hospitals. CIN's aim was to examine important outcomes of hospitalisation at scale, identify and ultimately solve practical problems of service delivery, drive improvements in quality and test interventions. By including multiple routine settings in research, we aimed to promote generalisability of findings and demonstrate potential efficiencies derived from LHS. We illustrate the nature and range of research CIN has supported over the past 7 years as a form of LHS. Clinically, this has largely focused on common, serious paediatric illnesses such as pneumonia, malaria and diarrhoea with dehydration with recent extensions to neonatal illnesses. CIN also enables examination of the quality of care, for example that provided to children with severe malnutrition and the challenges encountered in routine settings in adopting simple technologies (pulse oximetry) and more advanced diagnostics (eg, Xpert MTB/RIF). Although regular feedback to hospitals has been associated with some improvements in quality data continue to highlight system challenges that undermine provision of basic, quality care (eg, poor access to blood glucose testing and routine microbiology). These challenges include those associated with increased mortality risk (eg, delays in blood transfusion). Using the same data the CIN platform has enabled conduct of randomised trials and supports malaria vaccine and most recently COVID-19 surveillance. Employing LHS principles has meant engaging front-line workers, clinical managers and national stakeholders throughout. Our experience suggests LHS can be developed in low and middle-income countries that efficiently enable contextually appropriate research and contribute to strengthening of health services and research systems.

Essential Emergency and Critical Care: a consensus among global clinical experts.

BACKGROUND: Globally, critical illness results in millions of deaths every year. Although many of these deaths are potentially preventable, the basic, life-saving care of critically ill patients are often overlooked in health systems. Essential Emergency and Critical Care (EECC) has been devised as the care that should be provided to all critically ill patients in all hospitals in the world. EECC includes the effective care of low cost and low complexity for the identification and treatment of critically ill patients across all medical specialties. This study aimed to specify the content of EECC and additionally, given the surge of critical illness in the ongoing pandemic, the essential diagnosis-specific care for critically ill patients with COVID-19. METHODS: In a Delphi process, consensus (>90% agreement) was sought from a diverse panel of global clinical experts. The panel iteratively rated proposed treatments and actions based on previous guidelines and the WHO/ICRC's Basic Emergency Care. The output from the Delphi was adapted iteratively with specialist reviewers into a coherent and feasible package of clinical processes plus a list of hospital readiness requirements. RESULTS: The 269 experts in the Delphi panel had clinical experience in different acute medical specialties from 59 countries and from all resource settings. The agreed EECC package contains 40 clinical processes and 67 requirements, plus additions specific for COVID-19. CONCLUSION: The study has specified the content of care that should be provided to all critically ill patients. Implementing EECC could be an effective strategy for policy makers to reduce preventable deaths worldwide.

Improving case detection of tuberculosis in hospitalised Kenyan children-employing the behaviour change wheel to aid intervention design and implementation.

BACKGROUND: The true burden of tuberculosis in children remains unknown, but approximately 65% go undetected each year. Guidelines for tuberculosis clinical decision-making are in place in Kenya, and the National Tuberculosis programme conducts several trainings on them yearly. By 2018, there were 183 GeneXpert® machines in Kenyan public hospitals. Despite these efforts, diagnostic tests are underused and there is observed under detection of tuberculosis in children. We describe the process of designing a contextually appropriate, theory-informed intervention to improve case detection of TB in children and implementation guided by the Behaviour Change Wheel. METHODS: We used an iterative process, going back and forth from quantitative and qualitative empiric data to reviewing literature, and applying the Behaviour Change Wheel guide. The key questions reflected on included (i) what is the problem we are trying to solve; (ii) what behaviours are we trying to change and in what way; (iii) what will it take to bring about desired change; (iv) what types of interventions are likely to bring about desired change; (v) what should be the specific intervention content and how should this be implemented? RESULTS: The following behaviour change intervention functions were identified as follows: (i) training: imparting practical skills; (ii) modelling: providing an example for people to aspire/imitate; (iii) persuasion: using communication to induce positive or negative feelings or stimulate action; (iv) environmental restructuring: changing the physical or social context; and (v) education: increasing knowledge or understanding. The process resulted in a multi-faceted intervention package composed of redesigning of child tuberculosis training; careful selection of champions; use of audit and feedback linked to group problem solving; and workflow restructuring with role specification. CONCLUSION: The intervention components were selected for their effectiveness (from literature), affordability, acceptability, and practicability and designed so that TB programme officers and hospital managers can be supported to implement them with relative ease, alongside their daily duties. This work contributes to the field of implementation science by utilising clear definitions and descriptions of underlying mechanisms of interventions that will guide others to do likewise in their settings for similar problems.