Examination of malaria service utilization and service provision: an analysis of DHS and SPA data from Malawi, Senegal, and Tanzania

Factors influencing fever care-seeking for children under five years of age in The Gambia: a secondary analysis of 2019-20 DHS data

BACKGROUND

Malaria contributes to excess child mortality in The Gambia. Children under five are at risk of severe malaria and death if not treated promptly and appropriately. It is crucial that a child with fever receive appropriate care from a trained provider. The aim was to identify influences on child fever care-seeking in The Gambia to inform malaria control strategies.

METHODS

This cross-sectional analysis of The Gambia 2019-20 Demographic and Health Survey used logistic regression analysis to identify associations between source of care for a child with fever (public or private healthcare provider, other, or no treatment) and mother, child, and household characteristics.

RESULTS

Only 52.0% of mothers sought care from a trained healthcare provider for a child with fever-45.1% from a public facility and 7.0% from the private sector. 35.2% of mothers did not seek treatment. Mothers in urban households were 2.67 times as likely (aOR, 95% CI 1.504-4.736) as mothers in rural households to seek care from an informal source (e.g., pharmacy) versus not seeking treatment, and 0.29 times as likely (aOR, 95% CI 0.165-0.515) as mothers in rural households to seek care from a public provider versus informal source. Mothers in wealthier households were 2.30 times as likely (aOR, 95% CI 1.274-4.164) as mothers in poorer households to seek care from an informal source versus no treatment and half as likely as mothers in poorer households to seek care from a public provider versus informal source (aOR 0.53, 95% CI 0.291-0.959).

CONCLUSIONS

Maintaining The Gambia's malaria control achievements will require the active engagement and oversight of private pharmacies along with continued integrated community case management to reach mothers who do not seek care for a child with fever, and remove challenges to seeking appropriate care from trained providers. Whether influenced by convenience, costs, perceived urgency, or other factors, given the likelihood of urban mothers and mothers in wealthier households to seek care from private pharmacies, it will be necessary to incorporate private pharmacies into malaria control strategies while building public sector capacity and workforce, and initiating more effective attitude and behavioural change among mothers and households.

Were Women Staying on Track with Intermittent Preventive Treatment for Malaria in Antenatal Care Settings? A Cross-Sectional Study in Senegal

A significant gap exists between high rates of antenatal care attendance and low uptake of intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy with sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (IPTp-SP) in Senegal. This study aims to investigate whether IPTp-SP is delivered per Senegal's national guidelines and to identify factors affecting the delivery of IPTp-SP at antenatal care visits. A secondary analysis was conducted using the 2014 and 2016 Senegal's Service Provision Assessment. The study sample consists of 1076 antenatal care across 369 health facilities. Multiple logit regression models were used to estimate the probability of receiving IPTp-SP during the antenatal care visit based on prior receipt of IPTp-SP and gestational age during the current pregnancy. At an antenatal care visit, the probability of receiving IPTp-SP is 84% (95% CI = [83%, 86%]) among women with no IPTp-SP history and 85% (95% CI = [79%, 92%]) among women with one prior dose. Women who visit a facility in the top quintile of the proportion of IPTp trained staff have a nearly 4-fold higher odds of receiving IPTp compared to those who visit a facility in the bottom quintile (95% CI = [1.54, 9.80]). The dose and timing of IPTp-SP provided in antenatal care settings in Senegal did not always conform with the national guideline. More training for providers and patient engagement is warranted to improve the uptake of IPTp-SP in antenatal care visits.

Health postservice readiness and use of preventive and curative services for suspected childhood pneumonia in Ethiopia: a cross-sectional study

OBJECTIVE

Pneumonia is the single-leading cause of infectious disease deaths in children under-5. Despite this challenge, the utilisation of preventive and curative child health services remains low in Ethiopia. We investigated the association between health post service readiness and caregivers' awareness of pneumonia services, care-seeking and utilisation of pneumonia-relevant immunisation in four Ethiopian regions.

DESIGN AND SETTING

This cross-sectional study was conducted in 52 districts of four regions of Ethiopia from December 2018 to February 2019. The health posts preparedness for sick child care was assessed using the WHO Health Service Availability and Readiness Assessment tool. Multilevel analyses were employed to examine the associations between health post readiness and household-level awareness and utilisation of services.

PARTICIPANTS

We included 165 health posts, 274 health extension workers (community health workers) and 4729 caregivers with 5787 children 2-59 months.

OUTCOME MEASURES

Awareness of pneumonia treatment, care-seeking behaviour and coverage of pentavalent-3 immunisation.

RESULTS

Only 62.8% of health posts were ready to provide sick child care services. One-quarter of caregivers were aware of pneumonia services, and 56.8% sought an appropriate care provider for suspected pneumonia. Nearly half (49.3%) of children (12-23 months) had received pentavalent-3 immunisation. General health post readiness was not associated with caregivers' awareness of pneumonia treatment (adjusted OR, AOR 0.9, 95% CI 0.7 to 1.1) and utilisation of pentavalent-3 immunisation (AOR=1.2, 95% CI 0.8 to 1.6), but negatively associated with care-seeking for childhood illnesses (AOR=0.6, 95% CI 0.4 to 0.8).

CONCLUSION

We found no association between facility readiness and awareness or utilisation of child health services. There were significant deficiencies in health post preparedness for services. Caregivers had low awareness and utilisation of pneumonia-related services. The results underline the importance of enhancing facility preparedness, providing high-quality care and intensifying demand generation efforts to prevent and treat pneumonia.

Quality of clinical management of children diagnosed with malaria: A cross-sectional assessment in 9 sub-Saharan African countries between 2007-2018

BACKGROUND

Appropriate clinical management of malaria in children is critical for preventing progression to severe disease and for reducing the continued high burden of malaria mortality. This study aimed to assess the quality of care provided to children under 5 diagnosed with malaria across 9 sub-Saharan African countries.

METHODS AND FINDINGS

We used data from the Service Provision Assessment (SPA) survey. SPAs are nationally representative facility surveys capturing quality of sick-child care, facility readiness, and provider and patient characteristics. The data set contained 24,756 direct clinical observations of outpatient sick-child visits across 9 countries, including Uganda (2007), Rwanda (2007), Namibia (2009), Kenya (2010), Malawi (2013), Senegal (2013-2017), Ethiopia (2014), Tanzania (2015), and Democratic Republic of the Congo (2018). We assessed the proportion of children with a malaria diagnosis who received a blood test diagnosis and an appropriate antimalarial. We used multilevel logistic regression to assess facility and provider and patient characteristics associated with these outcomes. Subgroup analyses with the 2013-2018 country surveys only were conducted for all outcomes. Children observed were on average 20.5 months old and were most commonly diagnosed with respiratory infection (47.7%), malaria (29.7%), and/or gastrointestinal infection (19.7%). Among the 7,340 children with a malaria diagnosis, 32.5% (95% CI: 30.3%-34.7%) received both a blood-test-based diagnosis and an appropriate antimalarial. The proportion of children with a blood test diagnosis and an appropriate antimalarial ranged from 3.4% to 57.1% across countries. In the more recent surveys (2013-2018), 40.7% (95% CI: 37.7%-43.6%) of children with a malaria diagnosis received both a blood test diagnosis and appropriate antimalarial. Roughly 20% of children diagnosed with malaria received no antimalarial at all, and nearly 10% received oral artemisinin monotherapy, which is not recommended because of concerns regarding parasite resistance. Receipt of a blood test diagnosis and appropriate antimalarial was positively correlated with being seen at a facility with diagnostic equipment in stock (adjusted OR 3.67; 95% CI: 2.72-4.95) and, in the 2013-2018 subsample, with being seen at a facility with Artemisinin Combination Therapies (ACTs) in stock (adjusted OR 1.60; 95% CI:1.04-2.46). However, even if all children diagnosed with malaria were seen by a trained provider at a facility with diagnostics and medicines in stock, only a predicted 37.2% (95% CI: 34.2%-40.1%) would have received a blood test and appropriate antimalarial (44.4% for the 2013-2018 subsample). Study limitations include the lack of confirmed malaria test results for most survey years, the inability to distinguish between a diagnosis of uncomplicated or severe malaria, the absence of other relevant indicators of quality of care including dosing and examinations, and that only 9 countries were studied.

CONCLUSIONS

In this study, we found that a majority of children diagnosed with malaria across the 9 surveyed sub-Saharan African countries did not receive recommended care. Clinical management is positively correlated with the stocking of essential commodities and is somewhat improved in more recent years, but important quality gaps remain in the countries studied. Continued reductions in malaria mortality will require a bigger push toward quality improvements in clinical care.

Too poor or too far? Partitioning the variability of hospital-based childbirth by poverty and travel time in Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Tanzania

BACKGROUND

In sub-Saharan Africa, women are most likely to receive skilled and adequate childbirth care in hospital settings, yet the use of hospital for childbirth is low and inequitable. The poorest and those living furthest away from a hospital are most affected. But the relative contribution of poverty and travel time is convoluted, since hospitals are often located in wealthier urban places and are scarcer in poorer remote area. This study aims to partition the variability in hospital-based childbirth by poverty and travel time in four sub-Saharan African countries.

METHODS

We used data from the most recent Demographic and Health Survey in Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Tanzania. For each country, geographic coordinates of survey clusters, the master list of hospital locations and a high-resolution map of land surface friction were used to estimate travel time from each DHS cluster to the nearest hospital with a shortest-path algorithm. We quantified and compared the predicted probabilities of hospital-based childbirth resulting from one standard deviation (SD) change around the mean for different model predictors.

RESULTS

The mean travel time to the nearest hospital, in minutes, was 27 (Kenya), 31 (Malawi), 25 (Nigeria) and 62 (Tanzania). In Kenya, a change of 1SD in wealth led to a 33.2 percentage points change in the probability of hospital birth, whereas a 1SD change in travel time led to a change of 16.6 percentage points. The marginal effect of 1SD change in wealth was weaker than that of travel time in Malawi (13.1 vs. 34.0 percentage points) and Tanzania (20.4 vs. 33.7 percentage points). In Nigeria, the two were similar (22.3 vs. 24.8 percentage points) but their additive effect was twice stronger (44.6 percentage points) than the separate effects. Random effects from survey clusters also explained substantial variability in hospital-based childbirth in all countries, indicating other unobserved local factors at play.

CONCLUSIONS

Both poverty and long travel time are important determinants of hospital birth, although they vary in the extent to which they influence whether women give birth in a hospital within and across countries. This suggests that different strategies are needed to effectively enable poor women and women living in remote areas to gain access to skilled and adequate care for childbirth.

Current realities versus theoretical optima: quantifying efficiency and sociospatial equity of travel time to hospitals in low-income and middle-income countries

Background

Having hospitals located in urban areas where people, resources and wealth concentrate is efficient, but leaves long travel times for the rural and often poorer population and goes against the equity objective. We aimed to assess the current efficiency (mean travel time in the whole population) and equity (difference in travel time between the poorest and least poor deciles) of hospital care provision in four sub-Saharan African countries, and to compare them against their theoretical optima.

Methods

We overlaid the locations of 480, 115, 3787 and 256 hospitals in Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Tanzania, respectively, with high-resolution maps of travel time, population and wealth to estimate current efficiency and equity. To identify the potential optima, we simulated 7500 sets of hospitals locations based on various population and wealth weightings and percentage reallocations for each country.

Results

The average travel time ranged from 38 to 79 min across countries, and the respective optima were mildly shorter (<15%). The observed equity gaps were wider than their optima. Compared with the best case scenarios, differences in the equity gaps varied from 7% in Tanzania to 77% in Nigeria. In Kenya, Malawi and Tanzania, narrower equity gaps without increasing average travel time were seen from simulations that held 75%–90% of hospitals at their current locations.

Interpretations

Current hospital distribution in the four sub-Saharan African countries could be considered efficient. Simultaneous gains in efficiency and equity do not necessarily require a fundamental redesign of the healthcare system. Our analytical approach is readily extendible to aid decision support in adding and upgrading existing hospitals.