TY - JOUR AU - Awoonor-Williams, John Koku AU - Bawah, Ayaga A. AU - Nyonator, Frank K. AU - Asuru, Rofina AU - Oduro, Abraham AU - Ofosu, Anthony AU - Phillips, James F. PY - 2013 DA - 2013/05/31 TI - The Ghana essential health interventions program: a plausibility trial of the impact of health systems strengthening on maternal & child survival JO - BMC Health Services Research SP - S3 VL - 13 IS - 2 AB - During the 1990s, researchers at the Navrongo Health Research Centre in northern Ghana developed a highly successful community health program. The keystone of the Navrongo approach was the deployment of nurses termed community health officers to village locations. A trial showed that, compared to areas relying on existing services alone, the approach reduced child mortality by half, maternal mortality by 40%, and fertility by nearly a birth — from a total fertility rate of 5.5 in only five years. In 2000, the government of Ghana launched a national program called Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) to scale up the Navrongo model. However, CHPS scale-up has been slow in districts located outside of the Upper East Region, where the “Navrongo Experiment” was first carried out. This paper describes the Ghana Essential Health Intervention Project (GEHIP), a plausibility trial of strategies for strengthening CHPS, especially in the areas of maternal and newborn health, and generating the political will to scale up the program with strategies that are faithful to the original design. SN - 1472-6963 UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-13-S2-S3 DO - 10.1186/1472-6963-13-S2-S3 ID - Awoonor-Williams2013 ER -