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Research impact and uptake

Research impact and uptake is at the heart of COMDIS-HSD’s activities. Our embedded approach to research uptake has given us a reputation for achieving evidence-based policy change, as well as a reputation for achieving changes in practice through adoption, adaption and scale-up of our recommendations.
Using our impact pathway, we aim to influence national and international strategies where changes to health service delivery can have a positive impact on the lives of marginalised groups.

Ensuring influence on policy examples include the following.

  • Participation in the WHO Geneva and EMRO meeting on Hepatitis C care, with a discussion on adapting the COMDIS Pakistan hepatitis care package for other EMRO countries and a proposal prepared.
  • Selection by the Wellcome Trust as one of two ‘pioneers’ to discuss our work on the use of community dialogue to address antibiotic resistance at the 2nd Call to Action on Antimicrobial Resistance, held in Ghana. The University of Leeds is a signatory on the Ghana Declaration.
  • Support to the Bangladesh National TB Programme in integrating mental health issues into the TB control programme.  This includes being a member of a high-level advisory committee for preparing the policy documents for the UN mission of the Prime Minister.
  • In Nepal, based on our research, HERD helped develop municipal health plans; providing guidance to strengthen health systems and service delivery in urban areas; policy advocacy; support for health facility assessments; support to develop the national health policy; increasing access to marginalised groups; and dissemination of health facilities survey findings amongst policymakers.
  • Our Swaziland HIV/TB mental health-depression package was disseminated at MoH policy meetings and adopted.
  • In Mozambique, developed a national approach to health-related social mobilisation, including using our proven-effective community dialogue approach.
  • We are part of a national NCD working group in Swaziland to support the national scale-up of our NCD pilot. NCD, researched and developed in Pakistan, Swaziland and other COMDIS partner countries, has been reviewed adaptation of the package to the Nigerian and Sierra Leonian contexts.

Our research has had many influences on practice in the extension period. Examples include:

  • In Swaziland, our HIV/TB mental health-depression training has been delivered to health staff, and wider roll-out of the full package is planned.
  • With COMDIS support, the Pakistan Punjab Provincial MoH’s new NCD department is fully functioning. Our integrated diabetes/hypertension, asthma/COPD and smoking cessation have been scaled up in 36 districts of Punjab. Our community-based MDR-TB package has been scaled up in most sites
  • In Guangxi, China, clinical guideline, training and peer prescription review intervention developed and trialled – leading to a 40% reduction in antibiotic prescribing for children with upper respiratory infections (Lancet GH 2018) – is being scaled up.
  • In Zhejiang province, China, our CVD/diabetes care (NCD) package has been scaled up.
  • In Bangladesh, our NCD case management desk guide and training have been delivered to health staff and are being used by them.
  • Swaziland MoH has, based on our findings, adopted and are decentralising our NCD guide and training package nationally for community clinic nurse practitioners.
  • In Pakistan, our integrated Hepatitis C care package is being piloted with a view to expanding province-wide.
  • The Provincial Hepatitis Programme in Pakistan has endorsed the Hepatitis B vaccination package and implemented this in 36 districts of the Punjab province.
  • In Nepal, our embedded approach has helped the MoH with smoother planning and implementation of urban health programmes.
  • In Uganda, our text messaging approach has been included in the national malaria in pregnancy manual.

Products such as guides, used to implement detailed policy change and improve the quality of practice can be found in our resources section.

All our resources are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.