An online meeting was held on Wednesday, 2 June 2021 for the first exchange of the Health Campaign Effectiveness’ supported implementation research awardees. Ten project teams including BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health had the opportunity to share their plans at this virtual event. The objectives were:

• Gain an overview of the IR study portfolio and a deeper understanding of projects in one of the priority themes.
• Foster the exchange of study plans among IR awardees in the themes of campaign integration and transition to primary health care systems, with engagement and feedback from members of the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC), Campaign Integration Working Group (CIWG) (see members), representatives of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and HCE program office.
• Foster opportunities for awardees to learn from each other and raise common issues and discuss continued interaction and engagement in the coalition workspace.

Please find the launch presentation of HCE Bangladesh team here

The Second Annual Health Campaign Effectiveness Coalition Meeting highlights promising practices in campaign integration and transitioning campaigns into primary healthcare services.

See the meeting agenda here.

The meeting convenes actors in health system strengthening, primary healthcare, and health campaign programs that address immunizations, polio eradication, malaria, neglected tropical diseases and Vitamin A supplementation and represent multi- and bi-lateral organizations, foundations and charitable organizations, ministries of health and finance, implementing partner organizations and research institutions. 

Objectives: 

1. Identify promising practices that use campaigns and ongoing services effectively
2. Build consensus around actions the Coalition can take to foster learning, collaboration and systems change.
3. Have opportunities to connect across campaigns and local contexts in poster and networking sessions

The poster presented by HCE Bangladesh team is here

HCE Bangladesh team formed a literature review team with four expert reviewers, who followed a systematic approach to identify, screen, and analyze relevant articles on IHC implementation in the field of immunization in LMICs around the globe. The team used three search engines (PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar) to identify peer-reviewed journal articles as well as select institutional websites for grey literature publications. Twenty-three (23) articles (22 academics, 1 grey) were included in the final review.

The report will be shared after online publication.

The qualitative survey included Key Informant Interview (KII) & In-depth Interview (IDI) of selected respondents from the survey sites.

On the 18th of January 2022, the BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University, held a stakeholder workshop at Hotel Lakeshore in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on "Implementation research in health campaign effectiveness: A retrospective study in immunization related campaign integration in Bangladesh." Current and former Bangladeshi government officials, as well as stakeholders from other donor partners, attended the session. The stakeholder workshop was led by Dr.Malabika Sarker, Professor and Associate Dean of BRAC University's James P Grant School of Public Health, during which participants discussed their thoughts on the Health Campaign Effectiveness (HCE) project and expressed their opinions on the HCE research questions. The stakeholder workshop's objectives were first discussed by Dr.Mowla Baksh Chaudhury, Program Manager, EPI, DGHS. Following Dr. Malabika's presentation on the research project's overview, participants in the stakeholder workshop shared their experiences and thoughts on the research questions, which included the context of integrating vaccine-preventable disease with other health campaigns (such as Vitamin A plus, deworming), enabling and hindering factors of integrated health campaigns, and components that could be added to future integrated health campaigns to strengthen future health. Establishing a cost-effective system using a successful EPI platform, ensuring high coverage, introducing new and underused vaccines, utilizing EPI center accessibility, increasing social acceptance, and reducing field workload were among the contexts identified by the stakeholders for an integrated health campaign. They looked at cost-effectiveness, raising awareness, reducing vaccine apprehension, increasing coverage, and reducing field workload as enablers for integrated health programs. Promoting the campaign, communication challenges, human resource shortages, overwork, linguistic effect & capability of community care workers, media influence, conservative area, donor influence, lack of collaboration in fund allocation, misleading blamed on EPI due to rumor, not cost-effective, not equally emphasize on all integrated vaccine campaigns, and difficulty on campaign interval time scheduling were all mentioned by participants as stumbling blocks. They also suggested that future integrated health campaigns include elements such as fund mobilization agreement, target population homogeneity and heterogeneity, urban planning, intersectoral coordination, community mobilization, vaccine inequity, local health official involvement, human resource and volunteer network involvement, multi-sectoral approach, logistic support, equal emphasis on all integrated vaccine campaigns, and cost-benefit analysis.