New evidence presented as posters (above) included:

• Sustainability for a Village Health Worker scheme in Nigeria
• Availability of routine facility data for maternal and newborn health
• Community based newborn care in Ethiopia

Advancing Health Systems for all in the SDG Era was the overall theme of the fifth HSR conference taking place this year. Our research at IDEAS works to better understand what can be done to improve health and survival of mothers and newborns in three geographies and why some interventions work and others don’t.

During the conference in Liverpool several of our team members were able to show-case some of the IDEAS work in a number of sessions focusing on diverse research areas such as improved coverage measurement, community-based newborn care and the sustainability of a new health worker scheme.

On the first day of the conference IDEAS’ Principal Investigator Tanya Marchant was part of the launch of the global health supplement taking a closer look at improving coverage measurement in low-resource settings.

In a parallel satellite session Professor Lars Ake Persson, Professor Joanna Schellenberg, Della Berhanu and Bilal Avan shared some of their findings and learning from Ethiopia. The session titled: Community systems for child health in Ethiopia: achievements, challenges and visions presented a first opportunity to share some of the preliminary findings from the evaluation of the community based newborn care programme (CBNC) which IDEAS has been undertaking since 2012.

The recent report by The Lancet Global Health Commission on High Quality Health Systems in the SDG Era was launched on the 9th of October. Dr Tanya Marchant had contributed to the report as a member of the measurement working group and was part of a panel discussing the report during the conference.

On Thursday Kate Sabot presented her work on social network analysis to understand Ethiopian health worker advice networks during a poster presentation. One of the IDEAS’ newest team members Abimbola Olaniran participated in a lightning oral session to present some of his earlier work on community health workers providing maternal and newborn health care.

On the last day of the #HSR2018 conference Deepthi Wickremasinghe and Antoinette Bhattacharya presented their posters on the sustainability of the Village Health Worker scheme in Gombe State Nigeria and advancing health systems for mothers and newborns through actionable routine health information systems, respectively. Bilal Avan presented his work on the CBNC in form of an e-poster.