The second paper in our Primary Care Practice series is out now. Entitled ‘A model for community-based hypertension and diabetes care in rural Uganda’, it looks at a project we worked on in partnership with LifeNet International, as part of our Letshego-funded multi-country Healthcare Innovation Programme. The partnership set out to evaluate the impact of a non-communicable disease (NCD) care project, at primary care level, on utilisation of NCD care amongst self-funded (uninsured) individuals.

Improving NCD care at primary care level

The project aimed to pilot a ‘whole system’ intervention at primary care level to improve NCD care for the community in three existing rural health centres in Uganda. It consisted of training and mentoring of health workers and the creation of NCD care systems in health centres in rural Uganda. Evaluation included analysis of health centre data and feedback from staff and healthworkers. Results showed a significant success in managing and controlling patients’ blood pressure and an improvement in the proportion of patients seen in follow up with a normal blood pressure.

The paper outlines the key components of the intervention model (including diabetes and hypetension diagnosis and care algorithms), findings from the project and key recommendations for replication of the model. Read the full paper here.

The transformative power of integrated primary care

With special thanks to the authors: Josh Guenther, Caroline Jones, Ros Kirkland, Julius Kirya, Peter Le Feuvre and Sarah Montgomery, and to Associate Prof Adrianna Murphy for editorial support. The Primary Care Practice series is all about Catalysing Change Through Learning: it provides a platform to showcase the transformative power of strong, integrated primary healthcare, and aims to capture learning from PCI projects that can be accessible to all, inform future application and generate debate on the wider application of PCl-trialled intervention models.