PRIMARY HEALTH CARE - OPERATIONAL RESEARCH

The Contractor will conduct or supervise country-specific and multi-country studies on crucial PHC program operational issues. Topics will be elicited from Missions, host governments, and health care experts so that study results will directly bear on the decisionmaking process and will thus be useful to PHC planners in many LDC"s. Of 45 Missions, 30 have expressed an interest in the project and at least 16 will participate. They will play a key role not only in identifying host country needs, but also in facilitating host country/project staff communication. It will be the Contractor"s responsibility to select researchers, supervise sub-contractors, monitor activities, and collect/analyze study-generated data and related literature. To ensure dissemination of research results, the Contractor will establish at AID/W a PHC database available to A.I.D. staff, contractors, and Private Voluntary Organizations. The database will contain final reports on completed studies, the data upon which the studies were based, and a bibliography of related studies. All items will be uniformly documented and stored on machine readable tapes. Researchers will be encouraged to publish their findings in professional and scholarly journals and to appear before meetings of relevant audiences. The results of country-specific studies will be formally presented to AID/W and to appropriate host country and Mission officials. Various Missions have suggested specific uses for project data in their respective countries: (1) to evaluate and alter on-going A.I.D. projects (Senegal, Ecuador, Haiti); (2) to provide a basis for future bilateral projects (Liberia); (3) to analyze existing PHC program data (India); and (4) to augment A.I.D."s Population Operational Research Project (9320632) studies (Morocco). Amendment No. 1 of 5/30/85 extends the project through FY91. New approaches to operations research (OR) will be developed, based on project experience to date. Emphasis will be on: identification of priority PHC problems; the ability to generalize OR results; study of PHC implementation as well as design problems; the application of OR results by PHC program managers; and provision of practical assistance to A.I.D. health programs (about 12). Both systems analysis techniques and a series of small, rapid-turnover studies within individual countries will be used; this will require the use of medium- and long-term TA in addition to the short-term TA used to date. (PD-AAR-144).