Iuliano, A;
Burgess, R;
Shittu, F;
King, C;
Bakare, AA;
Valentine, P;
Haruna, I;
(2024)
Linking communities and health facilities to improve child health in low-resource settings: a systematic review.
Health Policy and Planning
, Article czae028. 10.1093/heapol/czae028.
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Abstract
Community-facility linkage interventions are gaining popularity as a way to improve community health in low-income settings. Their aim is to create/strengthen a relationship between community members and local healthcare providers. Representatives from both groups can address health issues together, overcome trust problems, potentially leading to participants' empowerment to be responsible for their own health. This can be achieved via different approaches. We conducted a systematic literature review to explore how this type of intervention has been implemented in rural and low or lower-middle income countries, its various features and how/if it has helped to improve child health in these settings. Publications from three electronic databases (Web of Science, PubMed, Embase) up to 03/02/2022 were screened, with 14 papers meeting the inclusion criteria (rural setting in low/lower-middle income countries, presence of a community-facility linkage component, outcomes of interest related to under-five children's health, peer-reviewed articles containing original data written in English). We used Rosato's integrated conceptual framework for community participation to assess the transformative and community empowering capacities of the interventions, and realist principles to synthesize the outcomes. The results of this analysis highlight which conditions can lead to success of this type of intervention: active inclusion of hard-to-reach groups, involvement of community members in implementation's decisions, activities tailored to the actual needs of interventions' contexts, and usage of mixed methods for a comprehensive evaluation. These lessons informed the design of a community-facility linkage intervention and offer a framework to inform the development of monitor and evaluation plans for future implementations.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Linking communities and health facilities to improve child health in low-resource settings: a systematic review |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/heapol/czae028 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/heapol/czae028 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press in association with The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | community empowerment, community health workers, community-facility link, development committees, quality of care, realist principles, under-5 children |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute for Global Health |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10192200 |
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