Health policy and planning
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To summarize the expectations held by World Health Organization programme personnel about how the introduction of the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) strategy would lead to improvements in child health and nutrition, to compare these expectations with what was learned from the Multi-Country Evaluation of IMCI Effectiveness, Cost and Impact (MCE-IMCI), and to discuss the implications of these findings for child survival policies and programmes. ⋯ This analysis highlights the need for a shift if child survival efforts are to be successful. Delivery systems that rely solely on government health facilities must be expanded to include the full range of potential channels in a setting and strong community-based approaches. The focus on process within child health programmes must change to include greater accountability for intervention coverage at population level. Global strategies that expect countries to make massive adaptations must be complemented by country-level implementation guidelines that begin with local epidemiology and rely on tools developed for specific epidemiological profiles.
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The Multi-Country Evaluation of Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) Effectiveness, Cost and Impact (MCE) was launched to assess the global effectiveness of this strategy. Impact evaluations were started in five countries. The objectives of the Peru MCE were: (1) to document trends in IMCI implementation in the 24 departments of Peru from 1996 to 2000; (2) to document trends in indicators of health services coverage and impact (mortality and nutritional status) for the same period; (3) to correlate changes in these two sets of indicators, and (4) to attempt to rule out contextual factors that may affect the observed trends and correlations. ⋯ This finding, along with low training coverage level and a relatively low child mortality rate, may explain why the expected impact was not documented. Nevertheless, even districts with high levels of training coverage failed to show an impact. Further national effectiveness studies of IMCI and other child interventions are warranted as these interventions are scaled up.