Integrated Infectious Disease Capacity Building Evaluation (IDCAP)
“Task shifting” among healthcare providers in Africa is already a reality, partly out of sheer necessity. With an average of just 2.3 doctors per 10,000 patients1, Africa’s physicians’ are severely strained to provide quality care to their patients, and are unable to attend to many of those in need. Training mid-level practitioners to perform tasks conventionally assigned to doctors such as prescribing and adherence monitoring, can expand the total output of formal health systems, and could play a vital role in helping sorely strained health workforces in resource-limited settings to better address the needs of their patients.
The global health community has greatly expanded training efforts for mid-level healthcare providers (nurses and clinical officers) – who outnumber doctors in Africa by nearly 20 to 1. However, there is currently inadequate understanding of which training approaches yield the best and most lasting results, cost effectively.
To address this challenge, Accordia Global Health Foundation, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, launched the Integrated Infectious Disease Capacity Building Evaluation (IDCAP). IDCAP is a 3-year program with the goal of evaluating a cost-effective method to build capacity among mid-level health practitioners in sub-Saharan Africa for the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases and other major threats to the health of African patients.
Accordia leads the IDCAP team in strong partnership with the Ugandan Ministry of Health, the Infectious Diseases Institute of Makerere University (IDI), University Research Corporation’s Center for Human Services (URC-CHS), and University of Washington’s International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH).
1World Health Organization. WHO World Health Statistics 2011. Accessed December 2, 2011. http://www.who.int/gho/publications/world_health_statistics/EN_WHS2011_Full.pdf.
