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URC/CHS Projects

Health & Population

Integrated Family Health Project
Projet Intégré de Santé Familiale (PISAF)

Client: United States Agency for International Development (USAID)

Benin, mother in hospital holds child

Integrated Family Health Project (Projet Intégré de Santé Familiale): This project, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), builds on URC’s accomplishments over seven years in northern Benin under the Integrated Health Promotion project (Promotion Intégrée de Santé Familiale), to improve integrated family health services, management systems (including planning and programming, logistics, information systems, supervision) and community mobilization. The project works in the clinical areas of maternal and neonatal health, child health, malaria, family planning, and HIV/AIDS.

URC works in collaboration with Abt Associates and the Benin Ministry of Health (MOH), focusing on the Zou and Collines regions. The project emphasizes quality assurance throughout all aspects of its work, including the development of standards, ensuring the use of quality data for decision-making, and ongoing improvement of services. Efforts to improve family health are focused in 6 out of the 12 departments in the country. URC is piloting innovative joint facility-community health improvement with shared responsibilities.  Community mobilization to increase demand for services and the distribution of services through community-based volunteers are also important components.

Through a recent award from the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), which has a national scope, the Integrated Family Health Project provides capacity building and strengthening of facility-based services, including intermittent preventive treatment for pregnant women, and improving the treatment of simple and severe malaria by training public and private providers and strengthening formative supervision. Additionally, the project supports efforts to improve the managerial capacities of the national malaria control program at the central and decentralized levels.

URC Services

Women with children, Benin

The URC team’s work focuses on strengthening the health system’s ability to provide evidence-based family health services that meet the needs of communities and families and to help communities become more active participants in their own health and in the health system.  The approach relies on a multi-pronged strategy to strengthen healthcare service systems by working in partnership with Benin’s MOH and collaborating organizations to:

 

PISAF is based in the Zou/Collines region, with complementary work in Borgou/Alibori and Ouémé/Plateau (green areas). Click image or link to view larger map.

Improve the policy environment through:

  • Implementation of effective decentralization at the zone level by:
    • Strengthening effective planning, financial, and human resource management for health zones
    • Improving local government resource allocation
  • Establishment of multi-sectoral approaches and collaboration with partners to strengthen local capacity for decentralized management, community mobilization, and behavioral change communication (BCC)
  • At national level, support for developing, updating, and finalizing policies on Mutuelles de Santé (group insurance programs), decentralization, community mobilization, and others that support access to quality healthcare
  • Support development and implementation of a national QA strategy and a contraceptive security strategy

 

Increase access to family health services and products through:

  • Expansion of group insurance programs (Mutuelles de Sante), availability of health services and products, and community-based service provision
  • Adaptation and operationalizing a national distribution system for essential family health products
  • Integrating new technical areas into the family health minimum package, including the provision of counseling and testing for HIV/AIDS, services to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS, antiretroviral therapy, intermittent presumptive treatment for malaria, and distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets
  • Leveraging Mutuelles as vehicles for health education and promotion and as an effective partner in search for quality services

Improve quality of services through:

  • Strengthening of capacity at various levels of the health systems and among NGOs and civil society groups to provide high quality health services and information
  • Development of evidence-based clinical norms and the establishment of mechanisms to revise norms on a regular basis
  • Implementation of improvement collaboratives to facilitate horizontal learning and rapid sharing of tested best practices
  • Strengthening of health worker competencies in critical clinical areas by monitoring performance through facilitative supervision and reviewing outcomes
  • Expansion and institutionalization of quality assurance activities at all levels of the health system

Increase demand for health services and prevention measures through:

  • Implementation of community mobilization and behavior change communication efforts to stimulate demand for health services at the community level through peer education, local radio stations and other media venues, participatory community theater, and materials development
  • Support implementation of an integrated, research-based strategy for health promotion and community-based services
Geographic Focus

Zou/Collines region in central Benin, with complementary work in Borgou/Alibori in northern Benin and the Ouémé/Plateau in the southeast.

URC Partners

PISAF collaborates closely with local and international NGOs, other USAID-funded projects and donor agencies, community-based and faith-based organizations, and the private sector. URC’s primary implementing partner for PISAF is Abt Associates.

For more information, contact:

Tonja R. Cullen, MHS
Senior Program Officer
International Development Group
University Research Co., LLC
tcullen@urc-chs.com

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