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Providers' Compliance to Malaria Treatment

NCT02298140 · Status: UNKNOWN · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 712

Last updated 2015-08-03

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

INDEPTH Network Effectiveness and Safety Studies in Africa (INESS) have demonstrated a substantial efficacy decay of Artemisinin based combination therapy (ACT) in Tanzania in 2012 (from efficacy of 98% to effectiveness of 18%). Hence system readiness for control and elimination strategies is severely compromised. Sub-optimal health workers' performance in treating malaria cases was a major contributor to the decay, effecting both treatment and patient adherence. If these quantified system failures remain unchecked it will pose major barrier in achieving malaria control and elimination goals. There is growing evidence that mobile phone text message reminders can improve health workers' compliance and patients' adherence to malaria treatment guidelines. Tanzania has recently harnessed all public sector health worker phones into Short Message System (SMS) platform. The investigators intend to exploit this opportunity in a randomized trial of messages to substantially reduce the decay documented by the INESS platform.

The null hypothesis: Sending automated text message reminders to health workers on malaria diagnosis and treatment recommendations, will not have any effects in the quality of malaria case management.

Conditions

Interventions

OTHER

SMS reminders

Text-message reminders about malaria case management will be prepared and distributed to all health workers seeing outpatients in the selected health facilities through their personal mobile phones and facility phones. These messages will reflect ACT recommendations from Tanzania's national guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of malaria and training manuals. The intervention will run for three months, two text message a day will be send to all identified health workers during regular working hours (i.e. between 8 am to 3 pm), three times a week. To avoid health worker's fatigue of receiving these messages, the messages will also contain some non-malaria humorous, inspirational, motivational and educative contents.

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • Swiss Tropical & Public Health Institute

    collaborator OTHER

  • KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Collaborative Research Program

    collaborator OTHER

  • Ifakara Health Institute

    lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

  • Don de Savigny, PhD · Swiss Tropical & Public Health

Study Design

Allocation
NA
Purpose
HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH
Masking
NONE
Model
SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2014-11-30
Primary Completion
2015-12-31
Completion
2015-12-31

Countries

  • Tanzania

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Entities

Diseases

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT02298140 on ClinicalTrials.gov