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. 2024 Jun 3;39(6):613-635.
doi: 10.1093/heapol/czae028.

Linking communities and health facilities to improve child health in low-resource settings: a systematic review

Agnese Iuliano  1 , Rochelle Ann Burgess  1 , Funmilayo Shittu  2   3 , Carina King  1   3 , Ayobami Adebayo Bakare  3   4 , Paula Valentine  5 , Ibrahim Haruna  6 , Tim Colbourn  1
Affiliations

Linking communities and health facilities to improve child health in low-resource settings: a systematic review

Agnese Iuliano et al. Health Policy Plan. .

Abstract

Community-facility linkage interventions are gaining popularity as a way to improve community health in low-income settings. Their aim is to create/strengthen a relationship between community members and local healthcare providers. Representatives from both groups can address health issues together, overcome trust problems, potentially leading to participants' empowerment to be responsible for their own health. This can be achieved via different approaches. We conducted a systematic literature review to explore how this type of intervention has been implemented in rural and low or lower-middle-income countries, its various features and how/if it has helped to improve child health in these settings. Publications from three electronic databases (Web of Science, PubMed and Embase) up to 03 February 2022 were screened, with 14 papers meeting the inclusion criteria (rural setting in low/lower-middle-income countries, presence of a community-facility linkage component, outcomes of interest related to under-5 children's health, peer-reviewed articles containing original data written in English). We used Rosato's integrated conceptual framework for community participation to assess the transformative and community-empowering capacities of the interventions, and realist principles to synthesize the outcomes. The results of this analysis highlight which conditions can lead to the success of this type of intervention: active inclusion of hard-to-reach groups, involvement of community members in implementation's decisions, activities tailored to the actual needs of interventions' contexts and usage of mixed methods for a comprehensive evaluation. These lessons informed the design of a community-facility linkage intervention and offer a framework to inform the development of monitoring and evaluation plans for future implementations.

Keywords: Community-facility link; community empowerment; community health workers; development committees; quality of care; realist principles; under-5 children.

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Conflict of interest statement

P.V. and .I.H. are employed by Save the Children UK and International and are part of the partnership funding the research.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Flow diagram of the literature review process
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Spider diagrams to describe community participation
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
New framework based on studies MRTs
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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