ORGANIZATION
CORE Group
YEAR PUBLISHED
2008
DESCRIPTION
This paper talks about a project with the aim of expanding the scale and impact of community case management programming for children under-five without good access to health facilities. Save the Children, with support from the CORE Group, undertook an advocacy effort with the Health Reform Unit at the Bolivian Ministry of Health to improve the quality of and access to community pharmacies with trained health promoters in rural areas. Developed as a parallel structure to the government health system, SC sought to better link the “botica” (pharmacies) to the MOH service system for drug supply and refilling and developed a three-tiered training approach to ensure that botica promoters were better trained and supervised. By the end of the project time period, the botica manual was aligned with national IMCI guidelines and simplified for low literacy workers, refilling forms were adapted to be compatible with health system information needs, a training course was piloted in five municipalities, and training of trainer sessions were conducted in seven of the nine departments in Bolivia.