I-TECH Presents at AIDS 2014 in Melbourne

Posted on July 17, 2014May 1, 2017

AIDS2014image

On July 20-25, the biennial International AIDS Conference, AIDS 2014, will be held in Melbourne, Australia. Dr. Gabrielle O’Malley, I-TECH’s Director of Implementation Science, is heading down under to present two posters:

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Patient Education and Empowerment to Improve Patient-Provider Interactions at ART Clinics in Namibia, lead authored by Dr. Ellen MacLachlan, I-TECH Senior Research and Publications Advisor

“If I Take My Medicine, I Will Be Strong”: Evaluation of an Innovative Pediatric HIV Disclosure Intervention in Namibia, lead authored by Dr. O’Malley

For full versions of these posters, contact Anne Fox, Communications Officer, at foxanne@uw.edu.

As always, the conference is a tremendous opportunity for those working in the field of HIV, policy makers, civil society, and persons living with HIV to share perspectives and knowledge — with a focus on the diversity of response in the Asia Pacific region.

The theme of AIDS 2014 is “Stepping Up the Pace,” and speakers including former President Bill Clinton; new U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Deborah Birx; and Dr. Tony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, will examine scientific developments, human rights, and lessons learned in the effort to map our next steps in the fight against the pandemic.

Read more about the conference — as well as the 2012 Melbourne Declaration in support of human rights in the march toward an AIDS-free generation — at www.aids2014.org.

I-TECH Presents at CUGH 2014

eLearning/Distance Learning Haiti Health Information Systems Health Systems Strengthening HIV Care and Treatment Kenya Laboratory Systems Leadership & Management South Africa

Posted on May 5, 2014July 25, 2017

I-TECH staff will head to Washington, D.C., this week to the Fifth Annual Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) Conference, which will take place at the Washington Hilton from May 10-12. More than 1,300 participants from 50 countries are expected to attend the conference, co-hosted by the George Washington University and Stanford University.

This year’s theme is “Universities 2.0: Advancing Global Health in the Post-MDG Era,” and I-TECH teams will present on forward-looking topics ranging from the implementation of electronic medical records to partnership with the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

Confirmed speakers include President of the World Bank Jim Kim; former Head of UNAIDS and current Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Peter Piot; and Head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University Jeff Sachs. Dr. King Holmes, I-TECH Principal Investigator and 2013 Gairdner Global Health Awardee, will also speak at CUGH’s Gairdner Lecture on May 12.

For those planning to attend the conference, don’t forget to check out the University of Washington Department of Global Health table — and to stop by the I-TECH presentations, listed below.

Kenya

Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Implementation at Scale in the Public Health Sector: Lessons Learned in Kenya

Haiti

Using an electronic medical record system to identify factors associated with attrition from the HIV antiretroviral therapy program at two hospitals in Haiti
Before and After the Earthquake: A Case Study of Attrition from the HIV Antiretroviral Therapy Program in Haiti

South Africa

Successes and challenges in liaising with PEPFAR partners and stakeholders in the TB/HIV Management Program
Evaluation of a comprehensive HIV prevention program in North West Province, South Africa: results from the pilot
Integrating research into program design: Conducting a situational analysis to inform comprehensive HIV prevention and care in North West Province, South Africa
Mystery patients: Training actors to serve as unannounced standardized patients to evaluate training outcomes for sexually transmitted infections in South Africa

Lab Leadership and Management

Certificate Program in Clinical and Public Health Laboratory Leadership and Management

Contact Anne Fox in Communications to see any of these completed posters.

About CUGH:

Founded by leading North American university global health programs, CUGH aims to:

Define the field and discipline of global health;
Standardize required curricula and competencies for global health;
Define criteria and conditions for student and faculty field placements in host institutions;
Provide coordination of projects and initiatives among and between resource-rich universities and less-developed nations and their institutions.

CUGH is dedicated to creating balance in resources and in the exchange of students and faculty between institutions in rich and poor countries, recognizing the importance of equal partnership between the academic institutions in developing nations and their resource-rich counterparts in the planning, implementation, management and impact evaluation of joint projects.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided the leadership and funding to plan this consortium. The Rockefeller Foundation provided a grant to help develop the organizational structure of CUGH in its first year of existence.

New Course Highlights Core I-TECH Principles

Uncategorized

Posted on March 7, 2014May 1, 2017

ethics_screenshot I-TECH is proud to announce the launch of a new online course, Ethical Conduct & Academic Integrity: Protecting Human Subjects in the Global Health Setting. The course will be required for all I-TECH staff involved in research, program management, monitoring and evaluation, data collection or analysis, or publication activities.

The goal of this course is to instruct members of the I-TECH team on the organization’s expectations of ethical conduct in research and evaluation activities. These expectations include conducting ethical and responsible research and programmatic work; protecting participants in studies, evaluations, and data collection activities; appropriately publishing original work; and avoiding academic misconduct.

“The principles of integrity and quality work form the foundation of everything we do,” said Ann Downer, I-TECH Executive Director. “The Ethical Conduct & Academic Integrity course will not only instruct us on the practical application of these principles, but also help us keep these values at the forefront of our thinking. It is essential to effectively — and ethically — implement our health systems strengthening projects that are affecting the lives of so many around the world.”

Created by a team led by Research and Publications Manager Ellen Wilcox and E-Learning Specialist Leslie Wall, the course is divided into four half-hour “modules,” or lessons:

Module 1: Overview
Module 2: IRB and Ethics Committees
Module 3: Human Subjects and Informed Consent
Module 4: Academic Integrity

The modules present the learner with scenarios that describe potential misconduct, definitions, historical background, helpful tips and reminders, and, finally a quiz captured by Canvas, the University of Washington’s learning management system (LMS).

The course in its entirety is publicly available in the Canvas LMS at https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/889645. The modules are also published on the University of Washington Department of Global Health E-learning portal at http://edgh.washington.edu/series/ethical-conduct-academic-integrity.

Moving forward, I-TECH will also require staff to take a yearly training on ethics and academic integrity. To this end, starting in 2015, I-TECH will offer an annual webinar to give staff the opportunity to discuss ethical issues and to ask questions about the UW Internal Review Board and ethics oversight process.

New Article Examines Effect of Training Approaches on Malaria Case Management

Health Systems Strengthening Human Resources for Health Malaria Uganda

Posted on January 31, 2014August 1, 2017

Martin Mbonye

In Uganda, the country with the world’s highest malaria transmission rate, effective training of frontline health workers is especially critical. A new article reports the positive effects of the Integrated Infectious Disease Capacity Building Evaluation (IDCAP)’s training approaches on malaria case management in the country.

“Effect of Integrated Capacity-Building Interventions on Malaria Case Management by Health Professionals in Uganda: A Mixed Design Study with Pre/Post and Cluster Randomized Trial Components” was lead-authored by Martin K. Mbonye, Msc., a researcher at the Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI) in Kampala, Uganda, and published in open-access journal PLOS ONE on Jan. 8; the full text is available online.

“This project made huge strides toward improving the capacity of health workers,” said Mbonye. “These findings have positive implications for Uganda’s increasing ability to take ownership of its malaria interventions and better fight infectious diseases – which account for the majority of the disease burden in the country.”

The IDCAP provided classroom training, distance learning, and on-site support to mid-level practitioners through two interventions: the Integrated Management of Infectious Disease (IMID) training program and on-site support, which integrated site visits and continuous quality improvement. Building on the work of the Joint Uganda Malaria Program (JUMP), IDCAP tackled a wider scope, including malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, HIV, and related infectious diseases. (Read more about the interventions and other results here.)

The evaluators then measured the effects of the interventions and the performance of 36 facilities. The results were promising; the combination of interventions was found to improve emergency triage, assessment and treatment processes, and malaria care, a topic of particular importance in Uganda, where steady temperatures and rainfall enable high levels of malaria transmission year-round.

As the IDCAP’s monitoring and evaluation team specialist, and then as program manager, Mbonye oversaw the project’s data surveillance system. He reported improvements in the use of diagnostic tests for malaria suspects, the prescription of the appropriate antimalarials for patients who were determined to need one, and a reduction in the prescription of antimalarials among patients who tested negative for malaria. This decrease in presumptive diagnosis is an important element in reducing drug stockouts and resistance.

I-TECH was one of four partners in the now-completed IDCAP grant to the Accordia Global Health Foundation, and University of Washington professor Marcia Weaver is the IDCAP principal investigator. This article is one of the first in a series of papers describing the study’s results.

New Article On Cost Effectiveness Of Training

Health Systems Strengthening Human Resources for Health Monitoring & Evaluation

Posted on May 22, 2013May 1, 2017

A new article on cost-effectiveness analysis of global training programs has been published in a leading journal on health workforce issues.

The article, “Cost-Effectiveness Analyses of Training: A Manager’s Guide,” was written by two I-TECH faculty: Gabrielle O’Malley, who is I-TECH’s Director of Operations Research and Quality Improvement, and Marcia Weaver, a Research Associate Professor based at I-TECH. Elliot Marseille of Health Strategies International in San Francisco also contributed to the article that appears in the journal Human Resources for Health.

The evidence on the cost and cost-effectiveness of global training programs is sparse. O’Malley and Weaver wrote this manager’s guide for professionals who want to recognize and encourage high quality cost-effectiveness analysis.

Weaver credits O’Malley with coming up with the idea for the article and spearheading it through several drafts over several years. In her role at I-TECH, O’Malley participates in meetings with policymakers and sees how compelling evidence on cost-effectiveness can be as well as the potential for cost data to be misinterpreted or misused.

“The objectives of the article are to promote professional standards for cost analyses and cost-effectiveness and show it’s feasible to provide evidence within the scope and budget of a training program evaluation,” Weaver said.

I-TECH Releases Updated Manual on Essential Supervisory Skills

Health Systems Strengthening Human Resources for Health Leadership & Management

Posted on May 20, 2013May 1, 2017

The International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH) is pleased to announce the release of the second edition of I-TECH’s manual Essential Supervisory Skills, which you can download here (PDF, 2.7 MB).

A resource for managers, this “supervisor’s toolbox” is a 65-page manual developed from years of research and discussions with supervisors in a variety of industries from several countries. This easy-to-use guide gives managers a step-by-step plan to develop their supervisory skills while helping their employees reach their potential. Seven chapters include background and instructions on accountability, evaluation, effective hiring and how to address performance issues.

“The purpose of the Supervisor’s Toolbox is to provide a convenient resource supervisors can turn to when dealing with the myriad of issues that come their way,” said Richard Wilkinson, I-TECH Human Resources Director.

Decisions supervisors make often have a direct impact on employees’ lives—and global health. Wilkinson points out that investing in training for supervisors translates to more effective, efficient, and happier employees.

“There’s an old saying that employees join organizations and leave bosses,” he said. “Supervisors directly affect the difference employees can make in contributing to the success of their teams and I-TECH. My hope is these tools will help supervisors communicate clearly and manage confidently.”