The overall objective of the HEALTH Project is to support and strengthen an integrated health system to tackle and reduce the HIV, tuberculosis (TB) and Malaria diseases burden at village level in Savannakhet province and to increase mother and child health care for remote and hard to reach communities in Lao PDR. It will be achieved in designing and piloting an intervention model improving the access for women, children, and adolescents to Mother and Child Health (MCH), HIV, TB, Malaria prevention and treatment.
The HEALTH Project is supported by Expertise France which is a public institution placed under the supervision of the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Economy, Finance and Recovery. Expertise France is a French agency for international technical cooperation.
https://www.expertisefrance.fr/
The baselines and endline surveys of the HEALTH Project are implemented by the University of Health Sciences (UHS). Located in Vientiane, UHS is the national training structure for health professionals in Lao PDR. It is under the governance of the MoH, with close collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Sport. The objective of the UHS is to improve the health of all Lao residents by training qualified professionals capable of delivering quality health care to the entire population of the country.
The HEALTH project has two interrelated components:
1) The research component led by Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) and Education Consulting Center (ECC) will inform and orient the intervention
2) the Action component implemented by Humanity and Inclusion (HI) and Community Health and Inclusion Association (CHIAS).
https://www.hi.org/fr/pays/laos
The project aims to reach two main objectives:
A first objective is to design and implement an evidence-based strategy using cooperative engineering research methodology. A strong collaboration with project partners allows building a continuum between research findings and interventions in the field. Regular working sessions between a Research Committee composed of Public Health partners and researchers will allow developing an evidence-based strategy to public health decision-making with the integration of HIV, TB and malaria prevention, screening and management for mother, child, and adolescents into the health system.
This intervention model including the Mobile Health Education Package (MHEP) will be designed through an ethnographic research in the communities and will be tested and refined through the Forum Theater method. Indeed, this will allow community members to provide their inputs and suggestions, so to co-elaborate an intervention model that is contextualized enough, culturally-appropriated and succeeds in engaging a broad audience beyond age and language barriers. In the meantime, the project will use the Forum Theatre to disseminate the results of the ethnographic study to a non-academic audience, to increase knowledge and raise awareness about HIV, TB and Malaria prevention.
The second objective is to evaluate the strategy, and produce and share qualitative and quantitative data about Mother and Child Health (MCH), HIV, TB and malaria prevention, screening and management for mothers, children, and adolescents.
HEALTH Project 