WDI’s PMI Team Monitoring, Evaluating AIDS Programs
Monday, August 27, 2018
WDI has been commissioned by Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD), one of the largest global medical technology companies in the world, to be a monitoring and evaluation partner for their BD-PEPFAR public-private partnership with the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator (OGAC) and the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in history.
As part of this work, Heather Esper, WDI’s senior program manager for the Performance Measurement Initiative (PMI), was invited to participate in a series of meetings with partners working on two BD-PEPFAR programs – Labs for Life and Infection Prevention and Control.
PMI, along with WDI’s Healthcare Initiative, is developing and will conduct an assessment of Phase 3 of the third Labs for Life partnership. The Institute will explore the impact and cost effectiveness of the Labs for Life activities, including laboratory system strengthening for improving quality management practices and fortifying specimen referral systems for HIV and TB.
WDI also conducted a retrospective assessment of the impact of selected activities for Phase 2 of Labs for Life. This work included a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a Kenya lab’s accreditation, and a quantitative assessment of the Kenyan National Public Health Laboratory Center of Excellence for Equipment Calibration, Certification and Training, which was set up and initiated by BD in partnership with the Ministry of Health. Esper and Pascale Leroueil, vice president of WDI’s Healthcare Initiative, presented the findings in April 2018 at the Labs for Life Phase 3 kickoff in London.
Also in conjunction with PEPFAR and BD, OGAC and the CDC, the Institute is working to design and implement an assessment of the impact of a new program, Infection Prevention and Control, in Kenya. The goal of the program is to strengthen health worker and patient safety through appropriate safe intravenous infusion therapy practices, leveraging BD’s longstanding knowledge and safety-engineered technology for averting HIV, hepatitis and other blood-borne pathogen transmission.
Esper said WDI is proud to be developing and implementing strong monitoring and evaluation systems on two PEPFAR public-private partnerships with BD, the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention focused on the prevention and diagnosis of HIV/AIDS.
“Both of these monitoring, evaluation, research and learning (MERL) systems have a large focus on cost-effectiveness and will help inform activities that should be scaled to help meet the UNAIDS’ treatment goals and beyond,” she said. “These systems also allow partners to track activities as they are implemented with the goal of delivering more impact.”
As part of this work, on July 11 Esper and WDI Healthcare Research Associate Erika Beidelman, traveled to New York for two working meetings related to the monitoring and evaluation design of both PEPFAR programs.
That same morning, BD, PEPFAR and other BD guests rang the NYSE Opening Bell to celebrate a decade of partnerships to address HIV/AIDS as well as to recognize PEPFAR’s 15 year anniversary, which has impacted 14 million men, women, and children with HIV & AIDS globally. Deborah Birx, Ambassador-at-Large, U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator & U.S. Special Representative for Global Health Diplomacy, Office of Global AIDS Coordinator, was recognized by BD for her leadership.