David Sinclair & Michael Gathu: Is global guidance at a national level worth the effort?
David Sinclair examines the use of guidelines by using information from the Ghana National Drugs Programme on how knowledge about drugs is integrated from global to local level. Michael Gathu evaluates the demand for a transparent guideline development process in East Africa using an example of this in Kenya.
David Sinclair is a member of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Dr Sinclair has worked within primary healthcare in the UK, Kenya, and North and South Sudan. He is now temporary advisor to the World Health Organization’s technical guidelines development groups on malaria treatment and nutritional care for people with TB and HIV. His research is centered on evaluating global recommendations at a national level, seeking to explain if there is any value added and the likelihood of implementing the guidelines.
Childhood illnesses are considered as areas for examining the use of these guidelines and in particular in the major causes of mortality and morbidity in children: pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria and neonatal sepsis.
Michael Gathu studies the demand for a transparent guideline development process in East Africa.. He examines what participants viewed as strengths and weaknesses of the entire process, what participants thought of the process and their recommendations.