Abstract
Globally, the number of COVID-19 infections is approaching 63 million; more than 1 million individuals have lost their lives. In Kenya, the number of infections has surpassed 80,000 and 1469 people have lost their lives. In Kenya, the community health strategy has been used to deliver essential health services since 2007. Furthermore, the population in Kenya is young (the median age is 21 years old) and Kenya is recognized as a technology hub in the East African region. Community-based health care, youth, and technology, are assets within the Kenyan context that can be leveraged to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic with concurrent strengthening of the critical care capacity at the health system level. This is a quasi-experimental study with quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection to complete a baseline assessment of community health unit and health facility service readiness in the study site of Siaya County in western Kenya. Following the baseline assessment, service ready community health units and health facilities with oxygen capacity will form intervention groups. At the community level, the intervention will consist of training youth, community health assistants and community health workers in screening, case detection, prevention, management and referral of COVID-19 cases with maintenance of essential health services. The community intervention will be enhanced by youth and use of digital tools. At the health facility level, the intervention will consist of training health care workers in basic critical care and caring for severe COVID-19 patients with maintenance of essential health services. The primary outcome measure will be mortality related to COVID-19 infection both at community and health facility levels. This study would be the first study to evaluate the effectiveness of an integrated approach in preparing for and implementing a robust pandemic response. Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov ID NCT04501458; registered on 6 August 2020.
Highlights
The number of COVID-19 infections is approaching 34 million; more than 900,000 individuals have lost their lives[1]
This study would be the first study to evaluate the effectiveness of an integrated approach in preparing for and implementing a robust pandemic response
Community health strategy The community approach would be built on the community health strategy (CHS), a flagship government policy that is based on the concept of social capital that is uniquely strong in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)[4,5]
Summary
Any reports and responses or comments on the article can be found at the end of the article. The community intervention will be enhanced by youth and use of digital tools. At the health facility level, the intervention will consist of training health care workers in basic critical care and caring for severe COVID-19 patients with maintenance of essential health services. The primary outcome measure will be mortality related to COVID-19 infection both at community and health facility levels. This study would be the first study to evaluate the effectiveness of an integrated approach in preparing for and implementing a robust pandemic response. Technology, youth, linkage to clinical care, COVID-19 response, critical care capacity building. This article is included in the Coronavirus (COVID-19) collection
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