Projects
COMDIS began in April 2006 and is one of several Research
Programme Consortia (RPC) funded by the Department
for International Development (DFID ).The award of £5
million over 5 years (2006 - 2011) will support research and development
work with our partners in the UK
, Asia and Africa
. The Nuffield Centre is the lead coordinator for the programme,
the Directors are Professors
James
Newell and John
Walley, and the programme manager is Anthonia
James.
COMDIS research
objectives are:
- To identify barriers and test strategies to increase coverage and
improve the quality of prevention programmes.
- After the assessment of key weaknesses, develop
and evaluate strategies to improve decentralized systems for
delivery of communicable disease programmes.
- To explore and test strategies to improve and understand the drivers
of demand for and the barriers to utilisation of selected interventions.
Our 12 partners are;
-
Malaria
Consortium London, UK and Kampala, Africa
-
Bangladesh Rural Advancement
Committee (BRAC), Dhaka, Bangladesh
-
NTP Bangladesh
-
Association for Social Development (ASD),
Islamabad, Pakistan
-
Beijing National and Guangxi Provincial
Centres for Disease Control, China
-
Shandong Chest Hospital, China
-
Guangxi Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, China
-
Shanghai Changning District Centre for
Disease Control and Prevention, China
-
Department of Clinical Medicine, Makerere
University, Kampala, Uganda
-
School of Medical Sciences, Kwame
Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi,
Ghana
-
The Health Research and Social Development Forum (HERD), Nepal
-
The
Good Shepherd Hospital Lubombo regional health, Swaziland
We also have additional collaborations in our partner
countries with the National Tuberculosis and Malaria Control Programmes
and in Uganda with the HIV/AIDS and Integrated Management of Childhood
Illness (IMCI) programmes.
Our Approach
Through
the experience and in country collaborations of our partners, we are offered
the advantage of embedding our research within existing national programmes.
We are able to respond to national priorities as and when they occur, providing
evaluation and evidence where it can have the most impact.
With our partners we identify the "bottlenecks" to effective
implementation. We develop innovative interventions and evaluate their
effectiveness, feasibility and sustainability within routine service
delivery contexts. We use a mixture of research methods; exploratory
research, piloting of procedures, trials and explanatory social and economic
studies. We incorporate research evidence and experience to revise guidelines
and other materials, which are then used to scale-up across the country.
Research into policy and practice
Aside from the conventional dissemination of research
findings, we have a particularly effective way of getting research
into policy and practice. Much of our success in this is due to
the production of diagnosis and care guidelines, training modules,
management, planning and supervisory tools. For example, our randomised
controlled trials of directly observed treatment (DOT) in Pakistan,
Nepal and Swaziland (Lancet 2001,
2006 and Trop Med Intn H, 2005) led to a change in the WHO DOTS
strategy (WHO, Stop TB strategy 2006). In Pakistan these materials
were used to implement TB DOTS in all districts, contributing to
a change in national cure rates from around 30% to 84%. In China,
we used operational research on decentralised care delivery to
inform the adaptation of our TB
case management guideline and modules.
These have been formally adopted by the national programme and
are now being used in training courses which will update the skills
of 110,000 TB doctors in China.
To view a flowchart to see how our research is incorporated into policy and practice, please click here.
COMDIS
projects
Our current projects are listed by country, a summary
of each is provided. However if you would like further information
on a specific project please contact Sandra
Holliday
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