CIDRZ receives a 5-year, $11 million grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation for a primary health care initiative in Chongwe, Kafue, and Luangwa Districts.
Our approach to improving primary health care begins with a simple and inescapable fact: good health outcomes are largely the result of good clinical care. This has been demonstrated by our successful HIV/AIDS program, which transformed expectations through clinical mentoring, data collection, and monitoring. We believe this model, applied to the delivery of integrated primary care, will reverse the patterns of the past 20 years in Chongwe, Kafue, and Luangwa districts and produce measurable improvements in MDG health indicators. Our primary clinical intervention is district-based clinical quality improvement teams. Our primary community intervention is patient follow-up and household assessments by community health workers. Clinic and community health workers will have clear protocols and receive ongoing mentoring, measuring, and performance reviews. The sequential roll-out from facility to facility will facilitate a rigorous outcomes evaluation through the use of multi-round community surveys.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham / Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia is one of four organizations to receive a multimillion-dollar grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation's African Health Initiative, out of more than 100 initial applicants. The DDCF African Health Initiative seeks to strengthen health systems by supporting partnerships that link implementation research and workforce training directly to the large-scale delivery of integrated primary healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa.