BACKGROUND Few studies have been done to assess socioeconomic inequities in health in African countries. We sought evidence of inequities in health care by sex and socioeconomic status for young children living in a poor rural area of southern Tanzania. METHODS In a baseline household survey in Tanzania early in the implementation phase of integrated management of childhood illness (IMCI), we...

Pneumonia is the leading cause of infectious disease mortality in children. Currently, health care providers (HCPs) are trained to use World Health Organization Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) paper-based protocols and manually assess respiratory rate to diagnose pneumonia in low-resource settings (LRS). However, this approach of relying on clinical signs alone has proven prob...

Background: Under-5 pneumonia mortality remains high in low-income countries. In 2014 the World Health Organization (WHO) advised that children with chest indrawing pneumonia, but without danger signs or peripheral oxygen saturation (SpO2) &lt; 90% be treated community, rather than hospitalized. Malawi there is limited pulse oximetry availability.<...

BACKGROUND The structured admission form is an apparently simple measure to improve data quality. Poor motivation, lack of supervision, lack of resources and other factors are conceivably major barriers to their successful use in a Kenyan public hospital setting. Here we have examined the feasibility and acceptability of a structured paediatric admission record (PAR) for district hospitals as a...

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether the outpatient, syndrome-based approach of the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) protocol could be extended to the inpatient arena to give clear and simple minimum standards of care for poorly resourced facilities. METHODS A prospective, one-year admission cohort retrospectively compared hypothetical performance of syndrome-based management wit...

The Integrated Management of Child illnesses (IMCI) and the surveillance Health Information Systems (HIS) are related strategies that are designed to manage child illnesses and community practices of diseases. However, both strategies do not function well together because of classification incompatibilities and, as such, are difficult to use by health care personnel in rural areas where a major...

WHO has proposed a public-health approach to antiretroviral therapy (ART) to enable scaling-up access to treatment for HIV-positive people in developing countries, recognising that the western model of specialist physician management and advanced laboratory monitoring is not feasible in resource-poor settings. In this approach, standardised simplified treatment protocols and decentralised servi...

BACKGROUND Limpopo province has among the highest child mortality and morbidity rates in South Africa. To address this problem, the African Medical and Research Foundation implemented an integrated c-IMCI and child survival project. This paper reports the organization's experience in the project. METHODS AMREF South Africa implemented and tested a replicable approach for integrating health sy...

BACKGROUND Burkina Faso introduced the Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI) strategy in 2003. However, an evaluation conducted in 2013 found that only 28 % of children were assessed for three danger signs as recommended by IMCI, and only 15 % of children were correctly classified. About 30 % of children were correctly prescribed with an antibiotic for suspected pneumonia or oral ...