Lodwar – 12th September, 2024 (Public Communications and Media Relations)
The County Department for Health and Sanitation, though the Directorate of Community Health Services, and stakeholders held their first Integrated Community Case Management (iCCM) technical working group.
The group, which brought together stakeholders in the community health services (CHS), discussed the modalities how to operationalise as well as scale up the community health promoters (CHPs) on the iCCM basic module.
This allows CHPs to identify and treat signs of common childhood illnesses – malnutrition, pneumonia, malaria and diarrhoea among children aged 2-59 months – and refer patients to the nearest health facilities.
Speaking at the meeting, Director of Community Health Services Dr Joseph Lolepo mentioned that the iCCM training is critical in enabling CHPs to gain expertise and knowledge in the diagnosis, and treatment of key childhood ailments.
This, he added, would improve child health outcomes and also identify children in need of immediate referrals, thus ensuring access to primary health services to the remote communities.
“Community Health Promoters will now be able to identify and treat childhood diseases in hard-to-reach areas and subsequently refer patients to the nearest health facilities,” he said.
He also advocated for the partners to intensify the supervision aspect of e-CHIS, especially monitoring the implementation through scorecards. The scorecards will enable the identification of areas for improvement and conduct routine data quality assessment accurately to further enhance data collection.
Deputy Director for CHS, Jonathan Long’iti, lauded the partner’s efforts, emphasizing the need to formulate communication strategies and guidelines for the iCCM technical working group to strengthen the implementation of ICCM.
Representing Save the Children, Nelson Akutan outlined subsequent planned activities of scaling up Integrated Treatment for Acute Malnutrition training across 156 Community Units.
The meeting, supported by Save the Children – USAID Nawiri, saw the participation of County and Sub-county Health Management Teams, USAID Imarisha Jamii, Welthungerhilfe Kenya and Turkana Christian Development Mission.