Resources

The New Nets Project was established with the goal of making the latest resistance breaking net technology more widely available to malaria programs throughout Africa. As well as managing the rapid deployment of new nets to partner countries and negotiating a volume guarantee to reduce prices, the New Nets Project partners oversee randomized control trials and pilots. The evidence gathered from these will be used to ascertain the impact and cost-effectiveness of the nets and support an appropriate policy recommendation from the World Health Organization (WHO). The New Nets Project is co-funded by Unitaid and The Global Fund, with complementary funding provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID. The project is led by IVCC. This report shares interim findings from the five observational studies led by PATH.

In many low- and middle-income countries, hundreds of thousands of people—including many newborns, children, and pregnant women—die needlessly each year from hypoxemia, or a low concentration of oxygen in the blood. Hypoxemia can be caused by a range of illnesses and complications, including pneumonia, neonatal infections, premature birth, obstetric emergencies, and respiratory infections like COVID-19.The COVID-19 pandemic has pointedly highlighted the lack of access to oxygen in lower-resource settings. The biggest barriers to oxygen therapy access include inadequate supply and human resource capacity, funding constraints, and the inability to deploy resources in countries rapidly in a way that ensures maximum impact while not overwhelming existing health care systems. The oxygen landscape is at a pivotal point where short-term pandemic-response efforts require continued support while transitioning to long-term, sustained strategies for ensuring access.This fact sheet offers an overview of the SOURCE project to support countries to equitably improve access to high-quality oxygen services at all levels of the health care system in order to reduce maternal, child, and overall mortality from hypoxemia-related causes. To do so, PATH will incorporate near-term pandemic-response work into a robust set of implementation, advocacy, and research activities that will ensure long-term access to medical oxygen and resilient systems for future pandemic-response efforts.

Medical oxygen proved to be a lifesaving drug during the COVID-19 pandemic in the absence of a proven therapeutic solution for patients suffering from the infection. In May 2021, India's health infrastructure was overwhelmed by the caseload, with a lack of oxygen, manpower, drugs, and hospital beds. The most difficult challenge for the country was providing an adequate volume of medical oxygen for the most severely ill patients who were unable to breathe on their own.PATH, with its extensive experience in respiratory care management, responded quickly and played a critical role in strengthening the oxygen ecosystem at this critical juncture. It provided technical assistance in the installation and procurement of PSA oxygen generation plants and oxygen concentrators, as well as improved their readiness.Furthermore, in order to build capacity for long-term sustainability, PATH developed, translated, and disseminated high-quality, reliable, and ready-reference knowledge products, such as the Guidebook on Medical Oxygen Management, Oxygen Posters, Standard Operating Procedures, Checklists, Case Studies, and Success Stories on various aspects of the oxygen ecosystem.

To address the critical challenges of neonatal and maternal mortality, Ghana Health Service and PATH have expanded infectious disease screening and treatment among pregnant women through the Integrated Antenatal Care project (2022‒2024).Working mainly at the primary health care level in nearly 70 facilities across 5 districts of Ghana’s Bono East Region, the project built the capacities of health care providers, improved availability of services through antenatal care, and strengthened linkages between primary and referral facilities.This manual outlines the project's health worker training curriculum to improve the overall quality of care, including diagnosis, prevention, and management of maternal infections in pregnant women.The manual includes six modules: introduction, infection prevention and control, laboratory diagnosis, clinical management of common infections in pregnancy, antimicrobial resistance, and monitoring and evaluation.The training is intended for all health workers providing clinical and public health services at the primary care level, including district hospitals, health centers, clinics, and Community-based Health Planning and Services facilities.

This toolkit highlights how PATH’s Living Labs initiative uses a 4D human centered design approach to engage frontline immunization health care workers to understand factors that affect their motivation and engagement in providing health care services.The tools in this methodology are geared toward co-creating solutions that are in the innovation sweet spot, which is the point at which the three innovation attributes (desirability, feasibility , and viability) overlap. The tools seek to accelerate innovation and foster rapid testing and evaluation.A key aspect is to frame the problem that is, to identify and understand the user, their needs, and their context and then co create solutions that respond to those needs. Although our learned experiences largely involved frontline immunization workers, this toolkit has also been applied with community members, caregivers, community health workers, and ministry of health decision makers, as well as global development stakeholders, to address the system wide complexities of a health challenge.