Strengthening the quality of paediatric primary care in South Africa: Preliminary work for a pragmatic randomised trial.

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There are important gaps in the primary care delivery of child health in low and middle income countries: there is little user-friendly guidance for health workers seeing children over the age of 5 or those with increasingly common long term conditions like asthma, and preventive care (like vaccinations and growth checks) is not smoothly integrated with sick-child services, making for disjointed care for children, their caregivers and health workers. The Knowledge Translation Unit in Cape Town has developed a health systems intervention for adult primary care (Practical Approach to Care Kit - PACK) that has become entrenched in health services throughout South Africa and is being piloted elsewhere in Africa and in South America. PACK comprises a clinical guide, a training package and work at policy and management level to prepare the system and the health worker for its implementation. The unit has conducted rigorous implementation science studies showing that PACK improves care and patient outcomes. The reasons for PACK's success are that it takes a comprehensive, simple approach to clinical care while tackling the systems issues that make improving primary care difficult. A partnership with the British Medical Journal is helping take PACK to a global audience (www.pack.bmj.com). In response to the gaps described above and to requests from those using PACK Adult, the KTU has now developed the first version of the PACK Child clinical guide in collaboration with local government in the Western Cape province of South Africa, and plans to implement it alongside PACK Adult in several countries. Before rollout, however, we need to work out two things: One, how best to implement the PACK Child programme in a system that has multiple other programmes and priorities - and limited capacity - and two, how best to evaluate whether PACK Child does indeed improve the care and health of children. This Foundation Grant will support the KTU to:- Develop and pilot the PACK Child health systems intervention package. - Design the research protocol to evaluate the PACK Child health systems intervention.- Establish a PACK Child Advisory Board.Each of these activities will draw on stakeholders from policy makers to nurses and doctors to children themselves to ensure that the PACK Child health systems intervention and its evaluation speaks to the needs of those who will use and benefit from it.