The Cost of Health Care for Children with Severe anaemia in Malawi, Kenya and Uganda

Date and time:  Thursday 03 October 2024, 12:30 hours

Location: L1 Main Meeting Room, Richard Doll Building, Old Road Campus, Headington, OX3 7LF

To Join: This is a free event, which will be taking place both in-person and online via Zoom/Microsoft Teams. Register

Abstract: Severe anaemia is a major cause of hospital admission among children in African countries but information on resources required to manage it is lacking. We prospectively collected health care provider and household costing data alongside the randomized controlled trial, titled: Dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine and azithromycin for the post-discharge management of children with severe anaemia in Malawi, Kenya and Uganda. This seminar will present costs of providing and accessing health care for children with severe anaemia across these three countries. The seminar will discuss the major sources of household expenditure for health care and the costs that respective country governments incur to provide blood transfusions and in-patient care to children with severe anaemia. The seminar will also demonstrate how health system differences affect the costs of health care across the three countries. Lastly, the seminar will highlight how this information will be used for an economic evaluation and budget impact analysis for African countries with a high burden of Malaria. Costing studies like these inform policies on health financing and the seminar hopes to show how this information can be used to strengthen health systems in African countries.

Bio: Grace Mzumara is a Malawi trained Medical Doctor, holding an MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine from the University of Oxford. Grace is a research fellow at the Training Research Unit of Excellence (TRUE) in Malawi and in the second year of her PhD in Health Economics PhD at the University of Bergen in Norway. Her PhD is a European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP) funded project evaluating the cost-effectiveness of introducing Dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine and azithromycin for the post-discharge management severe anaemia in children in Malawi, Kenya and Uganda. This is part of a large multicentre clinical trial with study teams at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI-CDC) in Kenya, Global Health Uganda and TRUE in Malawi. Before starting her PhD, Grace worked on child health and health policy research in Malawi at the Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust. She represented Malawi as a Women in Africa young leader in 2022 and is an Oxford-Weidenfeld and Hoffmann Scholar. Grace is in Oxford as a Health Economic Research Centre visiting scholar.