What Works? What Fails? Findings from the Navrongo Community Health & Planning Project

This is a series of online (PDF) newsletters written in order to share experiences with people in Ghana and elsewhere around the world about what has worked and what has failed in an experiment to make primary health care widely accessible to rural people. The overall goal of the experiment was to improve coverage and quality of health care services. Specific questions were asked by the Ministry of Health (MOH) that could not be resolved without evidence from a field trial:

• Is there a way to develop sustainable and effective volunteer components of the health care programme?
• Is there a way to mobilise CHN so that they are truly community-based health care providers?
• Can Community Health Nurse (CHN) mobilisation and volunteerism be developed jointly in ways that improve upon the effectiveness of deploying CHN and volunteers separately?
• What are the costs and marginal benefits of each option?

The Navrongo Health Research Centre (NHRC), with support and approval from the MOH, embarked on a series of consultations with the Chiefs and residents of the Kassena-Nankana District in Ghana. The community members made constructive suggestions that helped in the design of the experiment that eventually became known as the Community Health and Family Planning (CHFP) Project or simply, The Navrongo Experiment. Discussions continued and services were changed and adapted to community opinion, reactions, and advice. In this way, concerns about promoting the survival of children, addressing the needs expressed by women for family planning, and respecting concerns of men could guide the actual activities of the programme as it was developed in a micro pilot.

"What Works? What Fails?" provides a mechanism for consensus building in this programme. It aims to establish the credibility of research outcomes for large-scale replication and the humanitarian value of research findings. Though the schedule is not fixed, notes are circulated on paper, on CD-ROM (together with the M&E - 'Management & Economics' - results), and on the web approximately every two weeks. Each year, notes are arranged in a chapter thematic format so that the collection becomes available in a "volume." The author (Santuah Niagia) is currently assembling all notes into a combined volume.

Click here to access a related peer-reviewed summary "The Effect of Community Nurses and Health Volunteers on Child Mortality: The Navrongo Community Health and Family Planning Project" on the Health e Communication website, and to participate in peer review.

Click here to access a related peer-reviewed summary "What Works? What Fails?: Findings from the Navrongo Community Health & Planning Project" on the Health e Communication website, and to participate in peer review.

Click here for the full series online.