KIT launches website of the Collaboration for Evidence Based Health Care in Africa

The new website of the Collaboration for Evidence Based Health Care in Africa (CEBHA) is an initiative taken by the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT). It aims to facilitate the development and dissemination of knowledge and increased implementation of Evidence Based Health Care (EBHC) in Africa.

African collaboration
CEBHA was started by KIT Biomedical Research in January 2010 and continued with input from both the departments KIT Information & Library Services and KIT Development Policy & Practice. As the initial request for this collaboration came from Uganda, in May 2010 Professor Harriet Mayanja-Kizza, Dean of the School of Medicine at Makerere University, Kampala (Uganda) was appointed as acting director of CEBHA. Since then several African interested parties and Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) specialised institutions have contributed to the further development of CEBHA.

Using evidence in health care
In situations where health problems are severe and resources are scarce, it is most essential to know which interventions do work, are cost-effective and sustainable and which not. However, exactly in these resource constraint situations evidence about the effectiveness of interventions is often not available, not appropriate, or not accessible. CEBHA aims to promote and facilitate the use of current evidence to improve health care and health policy in Africa.

CEBHA is based on five pillars:

1. Collaboration & coordination between African countries to pool their resources and north-south coordination to pool methodological resources;
2. Evidence based health care and policy course development and implementation;
3. Development of systematic reviews and research synthesis that are pertinent for the African setting;
4. Developing research to determine what type of evidence based medicine interventions work to further optimizing African evidence based health care;
5. Dissemination of evidence relevant to the African setting.

Further setup and funding needed
KIT also supports the start-up phase of the project financially to begin advocacy, course development and implementation, and to initiate research on baseline knowledge and barriers in EBHC. The focus in 2011 will be on formalizing the relationship between the African partners, identify and acquire funding to be able to physically set up the collaboration, hire staff and ensure sustainability.

• Tags
:
• evidence based health care |
• Africa |
• CEBHA |
• systematic reviews |
• courses

• communication@kit.nl
•   | 
• print this page