WIHI: Saving Lives by Design: Lessons for All from Ghana's Project Fives Alive!

Date: July 23, 2015

 

Featuring: 

• L. Nneka Mobisson-Etuk, MD, MBA, MPH, Executive Director of African Operations, Institute for Healthcare Improvement
• Sodzi Sodzi-Tettey, MD, MPH, Director, Project Fives Alive!, Senior Technical Director, Africa Region, IHI
• Pierre Barker, MD, Senior Vice President, Institute for Healthcare Improvement
• Nana A.Y. Twum-Danso, MD, MPH, Founder & CEO, MAZA; Former Senior Program Manager, Gates Foundation; Former Director, Project Fives Alive!
• Kavita Singh Ongechi, PhD, Research Assistant Professor, Gillings School of Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

 

One of the biggest ongoing challenges facing health and health care quality improvers is moving from small-scale successes to large-scale ones. This turns out to be far more complicated than originally thought, no matter what aspect of improvement you’re working on. That’s why it’s incredibly inspiring to learn from initiatives that are cracking the code — moving beyond barriers one deliberate step at a time, to impact the health and health care of thousands and potentially millions for the first time.

 

One such initiative has been unfolding in the African nation of Ghana since 2008, where there’s now an amazing story to tell about reductions in mortality in children under five years of age in 134 or 80 percent of the nation’s public-sector hospitals. Important lessons learned from this initiative, known as Project Fives Alive!, have been captured in a recently published practical guide. On this WIHI, we assembled an outstanding panel to talk and walk us through the critical aspect of adaptive design that has made Project Fives Alive! so successful.