About
This project aims to address the healthcare delivery and policy gaps at the primary health care level in designing and implementing integrated COVID-NCD care to patients with diabetes or hypertension in Pakistan. We will implement a package of Covid-19 care integrated with existing NCD care, mainly for hypertension and diabetes, at the primary care level in Rural Health Centres (RHCs) of Punjab, Pakistan. We will conduct a parallel two-arm, cluster randomized controlled trial of the enhanced NCD-COVID-19 integrated care package in rural Punjab, Pakistan with a total of 1500 patients. The study will take 18 months. In the intervention RHCs, we will implement, in addition to the usual care in the WDF project, an NCD-COVID integrated care package comprised of: – Integrated NCD-COVID guidelines to support RHC staff to make health delivery safer – A telemedicine platform with a smart phone app and online IT – An Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (ECHO) based online platform for remote staff training, mentoring, and performance monitoring All interventions will be delivered with a culturally gender-sensitive and inclusive approach. We will evaluate the effectiveness of the study based on both NCD and COVID care indicators through patient surveys and data collected from RHC registrations. We will also conduct a mixed-methods outcomes evaluation, process evaluation and cost-effectiveness evaluation to understand how the project is implemented, what are the health system and other contextual factors that impact project implementation, and what are the unexpected consequences. This will help to facilitate future scale-up in Pakistan and LMICs.
Accepting Students
Please see details on this page: https://gisl.dlsph.utoronto.ca/job-opportunities/
Lead Faculty
Affiliated Faculty
