Project News

The Project supports the strengthen of Community Health Strategy (CHS) at National level, and one of outputs for the Project is "Effectiveness of policies/guidelines/tools for CHS is assessed through Operations Research (OR) and results are presented to policy level.".

OR activities were started by constituting technical unit which implement the activities proactively. As a result, in the 1st Project year, the research protocol was developed through series of activities such as 1) Holding stakeholders workshop at provincial levels to understand the current situation of CHS implementation and identify issues research concern, 2) Collecting and organizing comments and opinions from all Provincial Health Management Teams, 3) Discussion with academic organizations (Universities), and 4) Systematic review on CHS. These activities also resulted to formation of national research agenda.

In the national research agenda, 9(nine) thematic issues out of which research protocols were developed from the following themes contains human resources, cost analysis, and policy analysis, and related activities for these priority themes were started from the 2nd project year.

OR site selection criteria were developed in consultation with DCHS, senior researchers and the Project staffs. Main criterion is to stratify the areas into 4(four) regions by social economic activity, namely nomadic, rural agrarian, peri-urban and urban slum. Other factors include disease burden, security concerns, accessibility, marginalization and so on. In addition to the criterion, the survey was conducted and the sites were finally decided.

Baseline survey for Human resources for Health (HRH) on CHEW (Community Health Extension Worker) performance was carried out in November and December 2012. Step by step approaches conducted as follows; preparation workshop of developing the research questions, selecting the research targets, training of researchers pretesting, data collection, data entry and cleaning. Currently, baseline analysis is on-going and will be presented to policy makers and all stakeholders in April 2013.