Tanzania

Since 2011, we have been working to change this through the Health Partnership Scheme.

In 2016, THET established an office in Dar es Salaam to deliver programmes and projects that support and are aligned to the Ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, the Elderly and Children’s (MoHCDGEC) priorities with a particular focus on health workforce development.

Since then we have been supporting the MoHCDGEC and the President’s Office Regional Administration and Local Government (PO-RALG) to train and deploy the Community Health Worker cadre.

Ethical Care Scoping in Tanzania

AIM: To generate important insights on constructive interventions with a view to promoting and sustaining respectful care from healthcare professionals, with an initial focus on primary and secondary maternity care.

Partners:

• University of Surrey
• The Exthos Foundation

From the limited number of studies that have been undertaken on ethical and respectful care in Tanzania, it has been found that some health professionals implement unethical practices while dispensing their duties and some have limited knowledge on ethical codes of conduct.

Through interviewing healthcare workers, patients and caregivers, we will gather evidence on the positive and challenging aspects of respectful and ethical care in primary and secondary maternity care in the Tanzanian Health System. We will then develop recommendations for educational, research-based and organisational strategies to promote and improve the standard of ethical and respectful care provided to patients and care-givers using health facilities.

To do this we will:

• Collect data from two health centres (one rural and one urban) and two hospitals (one regional and one district) in relation to women utilising maternity services.
• Analyse the data and produce a report that will include recommendations to the Tanzanian Government on improving the respectful care provided to women using maternity services.

Read the announcement here.

Community Health Worker Programme Focusing on Quality Improvement

AIM: To strengthen the quality of service provision delivered by formal Community Health Workers (CHWs) in two districts of Mwanza and Simiyu region and to contribute to the evidence base on the value of CHWs in achieving Universal Health Coverage (UHC).

Partners:

• Comic Relief
• The Ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children (MoHCDGEC)

In 2016, THET was awarded a grant from Comic Relief to support the MoHCDGEC to train the first formal cadre of paid Community Health Workers (CHWs). From 2016-2019 we supported the capacity development of ten health training institutes and system strengthening at the district and regional level. This resulted in the training of over 1300 formal CHWs.

Based on the understanding developed through the implementation of this programme, we identified that there is still some way to go to realise the full potential of CHWs and to improve the services available to the communities they serve. There is also a critical shortage of empirical evidence on the impact that formal CHWs can have on the health and well-being of their communities.

To address this, we have developed a one-year pilot project that will:

• Contribute to the evidence base on the role of CHWs and their importance in achieving UHC.
• Develop tools and methods to strengthen the quality of service provision delivered by CHWs and the supervision provided by health facility staff.
• Support the deployment of a small number of additional CHWs.

Support to Establish an Academic Partnership between the UK and Tanzania 

AIM: To support the development an academic partnership between the UK and a Tanzanian partner which will lead to joint research activities with a focus on decentralised care and quality service provision. 

Partners:

• Queen Mary’s University London (QMUL) 
• Veta Bailey Trust

Building on THET’s experience in Ethiopia and understanding that academic partnerships in global health are vital to ensuring that we are working toward evidence-based solutions for the challenges that people face in accessing high-quality, appropriate healthcare services around the world. 

We have therefore developed a pilot project that will result in: 

• The establishment of a partnership between QMUL with the chosen Tanzanian institution. 
• The identification of junior lecturers with an interest in primary and community health care who could benefit from expertise to build their research capacity. 
• A roundtable workshop, to share experiences with interested Tanzanian colleagues on methodologies and lessons learnt with a focus on undertaking primary health research in a decentralised model of care. 

Read the announcement here.

For further information about THET’s work in Tanzania please contact our Country Coordinator, Linnet Griffith-Jones.