OPENING REMARKS
- Tim Baker, Associate Professor, Ifakara Health Institute Dar es Salaam and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Non-Resident Fellow, Center for Global Development
PANELLISTS
- Angela Kairu, Research Officer, Kemri-Wellcome Trust Research Programme.
- Karima Khalid, Anaesthesiologist and Lecturer, Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences
- Lorna Guinness, Senior health economist and Non-Resident Fellow, Center for Global Development
- John Adabie Appiah, Consultant Pillar Lead, Case Management and Therapeutics, World Health Organisation
- Mickey Chopra, Global Solutions Lead for Service Delivery in the Health Nutrition and Population global practice, World Bank
MODERATOR
- Pete Baker, Assistant Director and Policy Fellow, Center for Global Development
ABOUT THE EVENT
The COVID-19 pandemic is a critical care crisis. Many lives have been lost during the pandemic while countries tried to scale up ventilators and other high-cost critical care services, at times overlooking effective yet low-cost essential emergency and critical care (EECC) practices.
The Provision of Essential Treatment in Critical Illness in COVID-19 (POETIC COVID) project is funded by Wellcome Trust and is a collaboration between the Center for Global Development (CGD), the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), Uppsala University and KEMRI-Wellcome Trust. One of the key aims of this project is to identify the most efficient pathway for providing critical care to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic in low resourced settings from a provider perspective.
This work included estimating the costs of providing critical care to COVID-19 patients in Kenya and Tanzania and estimating and comparing the cost-effectiveness of different critical care strategies for COVID-19 patients in the form of cost per death averted/life years saved.
This event will unpack results from the POETIC-COVID-19 project. It will discuss what makes up EECC and how EECC is both an affordable and cost-effective way, relative to more advanced, high-tech strategies, to prevent the deaths of many patients who experience critical illness and improve hospital care in low resource settings. Researchers and policymakers will discuss how we can take lessons learned to integrate EECC into hospital care and scale this up in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to save lives now for all critically ill patients as well as in the future. If the Omicron variant causes a renewed wave across LMICs, then there is a short window to scale up oxygen and EECC. EECC offers an opportunity to do this and save lives. It is also a “no regret” policy as it will save non-COVID-19 lives should this be a false alarm.
If you have questions for our panelists, please submit them to events@cgdev.org, tweet @CGDev #CGDTalks, or submit your comments via YouTube.
