My Assignment in Eldoret, Kenya

I will be working for 6months at the Moi University School of Medicine, with the Global Network for Women’s and Children’s Health research, as part of the PULSE assignment.

The aim of my assignment is to improve the data analysis skills of the personnel in the various research projects affiliated to the Global Network Kenyan site. I will also be assisting post-graduate students with their research proposals and thesis.

The Global Network for Women’s and Children’s Health research is a global consortium of researchers that has collaborations between and USA and a developing country in the areas of child health and reproductive health. One of the objectives is to improve maternal and neonatal mortality through implementation of intervention community based projects and conducting community based trials and surveys.

Over 600,000 maternal deaths, 4 million stillbirths and 4 million neonatal deaths occur each year worldwide. The maternal mortality ratio ranges from 24 per 100,000 births in European countries to 1000 or more per 100,000 births in some African countries; rates of stillbirth range from 3 or 4 per 1000 births in the US and other developed countries to 100 per 1000 births in some remote areas of the developing world. Ninety-nine per cent of these deaths take place in low and middle-income countries, with the populations of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa carrying a disproportionately large burden.

Due to the unacceptably high number of fetuses and newborns dying annually in the developing world, the Global Network has designed trials to test complex interventions to improve the quality of care provided to mothers and their neonates by health care systems in study clusters. There is a lot of data being collected and one of the shortfalls in the developing countries is data management especially data analysis to enable publication of high quality research papers in peer review journals.

Moi University School of Medicine Department of Child Health under the leadership of the author in collaboration with the Department of Paediatrics in Indiana University School of Medicine are one of the 7 sites in the Global Network.

The results of the projects will inform government policy on maternal, neonatal health and child health issues not only in Kenya but in all low to middle level countries in the world.

I am excited about this opportunity to work with the Global Network. I hope to share my experiences and learning's with you over these next 6months. If you have any comments you'd like to share, please post them. I'd like to hear from you too! 

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