Training through malaria research: building capacity in good clinical and laboratory practice in Liberia

Abstract

Background Limited health research capacities (HRC) undermine a country’s ability to identify and adequately respond to local health needs. Although numerous interventions to strengthen HRC have been conducted in Africa, there is a need to share the lessons learnt by funding organizations, institutes and researchers. The aim of this report is to identify best practices in HRC strengthening by describing a training programme conducted between 2016 and 2017 at the Saint Joseph’s Catholic Hospital (SJCH) in Monrovia (Liberia). Methods A call for trainees was launched at the SJCH, the Liberia Medicines and Health Products Regulatory Authority (LMHRA), the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, the Mother Pattern College of Health Sciences (MPCHS) and community members. Selected trainees participated in four workshops on Good Clinical Laboratory Practice (GCLP), standard operating procedures (SOP) and scientific communication, as well as in a 5-months eLearning mentoring programme. After the training, a collectively-designed research project on malaria was conducted. Results Twenty-one of the 28 trainees (14 from the SJCH, 3 from LMHRA, one from MPCHS, and 10 community representatives) completed the programme satisfactorily. Pre- and post-training questionnaires completed by 9 of the trainees showed a 14% increase in the percentage of correct answers. Trainees participated in a mixed-methods cross-sectional study of Plasmodium falciparum infection among pregnant women at the SJCH. Selected trainees disseminated activities and research outcomes in three international meetings and three scientific publications. Conclusion This training-through-research programme successfully involved SJCH staff and community members in a practical research exercise on malaria during pregnancy. The challenge is to ensure that the SJCH remains active in research. Harmonization of effectiveness indicators for HRC initiatives would strengthen the case for investing in such efforts. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12936-019-2767-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Health Inequalities in the Time of COVID-19: The Globally Reinforcing Need to Strengthen Health Inequalities Research Capacities

“…Limited stewardship, limited provision of human, financial and technical resources, facilities, and infrastructure 19,21,40 ; conflicting social-political value judgments, ideology and interests 19,38,39 ; limited demand for, and prioritization of, locally relevant health equity-oriented COVID-19 research 19,21 ; limited academic freedom or creative autonomy to reflect, propose, and pursue critical research on global-societal-health issues such as health inequalities, particularly during pandemics. 19 Research infrastructure:…”

“…Information systems Limited stewardship, governance, and limited provision of human, financial, and information resources 19,21,40 ; limitations in the completeness and quality of geographical information and surveillance resources, with a health equity lens 27,28,37 ; limitations in the available, reliable, disaggregated and integrated health and socio-demographic data, to support the measuring and monitoring of health inequalities. 2,19,27,28,32,37,40 Research infrastructure: Human resources Limited access to available training in integrating transdisciplinary perspectives to be able to understand, analyze, and monitor health inequalities 19,21,37,40 ; "brain-drain" 19,21 ; lack of a local critical mass of transdisciplinary professionals, trained to understand, analyze, monitor, and evaluate health inequalities, and other complex global-societal issues such as pandemics 19,21,37 ; conflicting socio-political value judgments, ideology, and interests among research groups and individual researchers. 19,23,[37][38][39]…”

Health research capacity building of health workers in fragile and conflict-affected settings: a scoping review of challenges, strengths, and recommendations

“…Included articles, as represented in Fig. 2, reflected an HRCB initiative conducted in Nigeria (n = 6) [39][40][41][42][43][44], Haiti (n = 4) [45][46][47][48], Zimbabwe (n = 4) [40,[49][50][51], Liberia (n = 3) [42,52,53], Burkina Faso (n = 2) [54,55], Solomon Islands (n = 2) [56,57], Dominican Republic of Congo (n = 1) [52], Cameroon (n = 1) [54], Gambia (n = 1) [52], and Lebanon (n = 1) [58], most of which were published after 2015 (85%). Those initiatives centred around topics such as general health research methodology (70%), communicable diseases (30%), global surgery (10%), health education (10%), health policy and systems research (10%), mental health (10%), and epidemiology (5%).…”

“…This was reported to result not only in miscommunication between partner institutions, but it also led to misunderstandings of programme material among learners. A few studies also highlighted that the academic difficulty of material presented to participants was a learning barrier, particularly when the knowledge presented in the HRCB intervention was beyond the educational level of learners [43,51,53,57].…”

“…Evaluation challenges Our analysis also revealed that studies reported challenges concerning the assessment and evaluation of the HRCB interventions. Studies indicated that the low rate of participant engagement when tasked with evaluating the HRCB initiative limited the collection of adequate data regarding the success of HRCB interventions [53,58]. Furthermore, studies reported concerns regarding the evaluation approach and evaluation tools used to assess the HRCB programmes [44,45,51,53,57].…”