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CHAMPS Panel Presentation at the 2017 IANPHI Annual Meeting
November 16, 2017
CHAMPS News
CHAMPS Network Takes Child Health and Mortality Prevention Message to Rome, Italy
Rome, Italy | October 2017
Over 100 public health leaders from around the world attended a panel on the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance Network’s vision, work and impact at the International Association of National Public Health Institute’s 2017 Annual Meeting in Rome, Italy.
Comprised of leaders from four CHAMPS sites: Dr. Eduardo Samo Gudo, from in Bangladesh, Dr. Natalie Mayet from South Africa, and Dr. Thomas Samba from Sierra Leone, each panelist shared updates on CHAMPS work in their countries and reiterated the need to build and share knowledge to save children’s lives.
No child should die of preventable causes.
At last year’s annual meeting the CHAMPS workshop explored the need for good data and the translation of that data into action. This year the panel described their efforts to do just that: collect quality data that can be translated to on-the-ground change to save young lives. Jeff Koplan, Strategic Advisor to CHAMPS, summed up the challenge,
“The key question is: how do we get CHAMPS information through the health system to make a difference in people’s lives?”
Because the Network’s goal is to provide accurate, timely and reliable data on the causes of death and sickness for children under five, the result of that is improved health outcomes and quality of life.
Data-to-action saves lives
High-quality child-mortality data has the potential to create better interventions when that data are translated into action. Speaking about the utility of CHAMPS data in identifying specific causes of death, Dr. Natalie Mayet from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) explained,
“Multiple pathology and multiple pathogen causes of death have been underestimated in the medical community,” said Dr. Mayet.
“By using Minimally Invasive Tissue Sampling (MITS) to more closely study the causes of death, we can go into specifics. We can identify specific pathogens, and we can identify co-infections and co-morbidities.”
This specificity offers opportunities to create more targeted interventions that respond to community-level health challenges. In her presentation, Dr. Meerjady Sabrina Flora from the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control & Research (IEDCR) described the community-level impact of CHAMPS data,
“These data will help the global community to deliver the right intervention to the right children in the right place, to save lives.”
CHAMPS data informs both public health decisions and policy changes through dissemination across multiple organizations- including national public health institutes. With the help of IANPHI’s network, public health institutes and other partners operating in CHAMPS countries have the capacity to translate data into action and have life-saving impact.
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