A recent post described the very successful child oral health improvement workshop at Mponela in May. One of the main outcomes, suggested by the representatives from the Ministries of Health and Education, was to establish a Task Force that would develop a National Child Oral Health Improvement Plan. Work is now underway between Malawian and Scottish stakeholders to draft a Concept Paper and Terms of Reference for the Task Force, which will be submitted to the Ministry of Health for comment and approval.
In an earlier post, we had introduced some of the Assistant Lecturers who had been appointed through World Bank funding as teaching staff for the new Bachelor of Dental Surgery degree programme at Kamuzu University of Health Sciences (KUHeS). One of these staff members is Don Chiwaya, who is currently in South Africa pursuing specialist training in Dental Public Health, prior to returning to his academic post at KUHeS. When Don read our blog post about the Mponela meeting, he contacted Lorna Macpherson, who provides him with informal mentoring. Don is at a stage in his postgraduate training when he needs to undertake some project work for his dissertation, ideally operating at a national level in Malawi. Lorna and I, therefore, set up a Zoom call with Don to discuss possibilities.
As a result of this call, and following discussions with Malawian colleagues, it has been agreed that Don will join the Task Force being established to develop a National Child Oral Health Improvement Plan. This will provide him with great experience of working at a national level and ensure that when he returns to Malawi at the end of his specialist training in dental public health he will be perfectly placed to participate in the implementation of the programme developed by the Task Force.
Prior to the meeting at Mponela, Yuka had alerted us to a WHO and UNICEF collaboration entitled “Well-Child and Adolescent Care Visits: Programmatic Direction”. The package provides guidance on scheduled child and adolescent well-care visits – seventeen interactions from birth through the teenage years. Oral health assessments are already incorporated into some of the visits. The programme is being overseen by Dr Anne Rerimoi, a paediatrician and epidemiologist who is currently employed as a WHO consultant based in Liverpool, U.K.. Lorna, Yuka and I had a very useful Zoom call with Anne in April, following which she kindly provided a pre-recorded presentation that we were able to share with the workshop delegates in Mponela:
There is a special relevance to our ongoing work on child oral health because Malawi is one of the countries that has been chosen to pilot the WHO/UNICEF package. This provides a potential opportunity for us to link the work of the Task Force developing a Child Oral Health Improvement Plan with introduction of the new WHO/UNICEF package, potentially benefitting both programmes.
In order to pursue discussions further, Lorna and I invited Anne to visit us in Glasgow. Anne travelled from Liverpool on Sunday 14th July and we met her on the Monday morning at the hotel in which she had stayed overnight.
We walked to the Dental School and then spent a very valuable morning identifying the ways in which we could integrate our efforts. Anne explained that she would be visiting Malawi at the end of July to meet with key stakeholders, some of whom are Ministry of Health officials already familiar with the MalDent Project. It was a great opportunity for Lorna and I to provide Anne with a detailed summary of the various facets of the MalDent Project and of our ambitions around child oral health improvement. Similarly, Anne was able to provide us with additional information on her own programme of work.
Following our deliberations during the morning we headed across to our favourite local Italian restaurant, Café Anti Pasti, to continue the discussions.
It was a fantastic day which identified many exciting opportunities for collaboration. We are very grateful to Dr Yuka Makino for alerting us to the planned pilot in Malawi of the WHO/UNICEF programme of child welfare visits. Joining forces at this early stage will allow us to plan activities and collaborate in a logical, structured fashion. Watch out for future posts as we take this work stream forward.