COVID-19 Response: Supporting Health Systems in Our Partner Countries

WHO representatives discuss COVID-19 protocols with Seed Physician Educator Dr. Matthew Haldeman in Lusaka, Zambia.

In the face of COVID-19, Seed Global Health (Seed) has partnered with key training and clinical institutions and Ministries of Health in Malawi, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Zambia to mount a broad COVID-19 response that seeks to: 

• Protect frontline health workers 
• Maintain essential health services
• Build long-term health systems capacity 

Across all our program countries, Seed staff serve on national COVID-19 response task forces and provide support through those mechanisms. We focus on priority areas most closely aligned with our technical expertise and the urgent needs articulated to us by our partners. 

Seed Educators continue to support our partners through an array of health professional training and capacity building programs including mentorship of staff and residents, as well as, clinical site preparation for maintaining health services during the pandemic.

Country Responses:

• Malawi: We partner with the Ministry of Health, UNFPA, the national nursing council, and clinical institutions on the development of national guidelines for managing COVID-19 and maintaining health services for infected pregnant women.
• Sierra Leone: We advise the office of the Vice President and Ministry of Health and Sanitation on clinical guidelines for managing COVID-19 and capacity needed to maintain essential health services for women and children during the pandemic.
• Uganda: We participate in the national incident command and were selected to conduct regional COVID-19 train-the-trainer activities in 2 regions and 3 regional referral hospitals. Seed has helped train more than 292 trainers and clinical staff.
• Zambia: We conduct in-person and online training for residents and clinicians on the use of lung point-of-care ultrasound as a diagnostic tool for the identification of COVID-19. While Chilenje Hospital experienced its first COVID-19 patients, physicians continued to deliver health services and clinical mentorship.

Globally, we are focused on public awareness, convening, and online training to ensure health workers are adequately supported and that policies of our partner countries, the US Government, and multilateral agencies are centered on both COVID response, as well as, ongoing capacity building within health systems.

We have also introduced new modes of training and education, including a new online hub for COVID-19 training and guidelines (http://www.c19hub.io/) for partners, health leaders, and governments. Launched this spring, the tool has been engineered and optimized for low-bandwidth operation and includes more than 700 clinical resources accessed by hundreds of sites across 21 countries.