Enhancing community-based care of children with severe acute malnutrition (The RECOVER study)

project summary

The RECOVER project aims to improve community-based care of severe malnutrition in young children. Globally, more than 13 million children are affected by severe acute malnutrition (SAM) with grave consequences for their short- and long-term development. WHO recommends that children are treated at home, rather than admitted to a clinic, if they do not have medical complications. Community-based care has great potential to increase the accessibility of treatment for families and reduce costs for health care systems in low-resources settings. However, the uptake of community care programs remains low, and even when children do receive treatment, a large proportion of them do not recover fully during treatment or relapse to malnutrition shortly after.

In RECOVER, we will use a broad approach to answer our overall research question: “How can we increase the uptake and success rate of community-based management of children with SAM?”

We will investigate barriers and facilitating factors at all levels, from clinical risk factors of the individual children to organizational issues in the international and national agencies involved in facilitating uptake of programs. The project will link research environments in Mwanza, Tanzania; Kilifi, Kenya; and Copenhagen, Denmark, that have complimentary areas of expertise in child malnutrition, to join forces for a multidisciplinary approach this challenge.

Our goal is to use the project findings to co-develop recommendations on how to improve community-based SAM treatment in collaboration with local and global stakeholders.