A very interesting commentary from CHIFA member Mike English in Health Policy and Planning. I am copying this also to HIFA as I think the commentary applies not only to child healthcare but to all healthcare.
CITATION: Improving Emergency and Admission Care in Low-Resource, High Mortality Hospital Settings – Not as Easy as A, B, C
Mike English, MBBChir, MD, FMedSci
Health Policy and Planning https://doi.org/10.1093/heapol/czab128
KEY MESSAGES:
- Strategies to provide emergency care training and promote use of clinical guidelines targeting common severe illness in newborns and children are available but there remain few studies testing the consequences of introducing these through multifaceted interventions
- Unlike studies that compare two quite specific treatments (eg. drug A vs drug B) interventions that target improvement in delivery of emergency care and multiple guidelines require very many changes in the organisation and behaviour of multiple health workers (eg. so that a team follows the key A, B, C steps of an emergency protocol and then continues to offer correct care over hours or days)
- Some approaches to evaluating such multi-faceted interventions try and specify the complicated but logical sequence of changes or steps in care that need to be achieved so that patient outcomes including mortality are improved. These approaches may also recognise the complicated set of contextual factors that may influence implementation itself and patient outcomes. In principle good study designs and analytic models might then account for all such influential factors to provide good evidence of effect for decision makers
- There are concerns that even very carefully designed studies that treat health care delivery as a complicated problem, especially those focused on organisations as the unit of study, may not in the end provide the evidence needed. Instead, we need study designs and research platforms that deal with complex systems.
Join HIFA: www.hifa.org/joinhifa
Join CHIFA (child health and rights): http://www.hifa.org/joinchifa
Neil Pakenham-Walsh, HIFA Coordinator, neil@hifa.org www.hifa.org
