CORE Group Special Initiative: Community Case Management of Children
When children in low-income countries die of preventable causes, it is often at home, in the care of the family. Children often acquire infections unpredictably and can rapidly deteriorate and die without timely care and treatment.
Sixty percent of approximately nine million children who die annually would survive if their caregivers had access to low-cost, life-saving antibiotics, anti-malarials, oral rehydration solution and zinc supplements accompanied by nutritional and home care advice. These life-saving treatments for pneumonia, malaria, diarrhea, and newborn sepsis can be delivered by trained and supervised community health workers who reside close to where children live. This community case management (CCM) strategy addresses these avoidable tragedies by overcoming geographical and cultural barriers that prevent families from accessing formal healthcare services.
CORE Group and CCM
One of CORE Group’s major contributions to CCM began with involvement of its Community Health Network , which provided expert input from around the world, including major international health organizations (WHO, USAID, UNICEF). This effort culminated in Community Case Management Essentials, a guide designed to help programmers design, manage and evaluate high quality, sustainable CCM efforts that can reach vulnerable families in large numbers. This guide is complementary to and in harmony with CCM materials developed by WHO, Save the Children, UNICEF and others, ensuring consistency, clarity and comprehensive support to programmers.
The development of the Essentials Guide is part of a larger CORE Group CCM Initiative that seeks to methodically advance this approach and its affiliated standards and tools, in order to expedite global implementation of quality CCM programming.