Global Presence

MSH's Malawi Program is working to reduce the number of child deaths and illnesses through collaboration with managers to design and implement services and systems that can provide improved health care to children and their families.

The Malawi Program is focusing on four areas:

• preventing and managing of childhood illnesses;
• increasing malaria prevention activities;
• decentralizing the district health system;
• facilitating the autonomy of two central hospitals.

In preventing childhood diseases and malaria, the Malawi program is developing a national policy and implementation strategy for community IMCI (Integrated Management of Childhood Illness) aimed at advancing provider and caretaker practices. Malaria prevention is being addressed by expanding community access to insecticide treated nets, and by increasing the use of Intermittent Presumptive Treatment for Malaria (IPT). In order to decentralize the district health systems, District Health Management teams are working with eight districts to provide technical assistance to improve information management, planning and budgeting, transportation management, and communication skills to produce an effective implementation of the Essential Health Package. The Project also works with the district teams to improve the quality of routine data collection and management, enabling health staff at all levels to become engaged in the use of health data for decision making. In addition, USAID has recently asked the program to distribute HIV rapid test kits to district hospitals in order to implement Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT) services.

Lastly, to promote hospital autonomy, the Malawi program provides technical assistance to two hospitals and to the national level to create an appropriate legal framework. Customized software that monitors estimates of potential, actual and lost revenue for hospitals and key performance indicators that monitor and evaluate hospital services and care delivery will be introduced to enable the project to review hospital service efficiency.

MSH is partnering with The Malawi Red Cross, the American National Red Cross, Health Partners of Southern Africa and Satellife on this program.