GELA: Identifying priorities for newborn and child health guidelines
The GELA (Global Evidence – Local Adaptation) consortium is coordinated by Dr Tamara Kredo at the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), South Africa, with partners from Malawi, Nigeria, Norway and the United Kingdom. The primary aim of the GELA project is to maximise the impact of research on poverty-related diseases through a programme of increasing decision-makers’ capacity to use global research to develop locally relevant guidelines for newborn and child health.
The project will build on and add value to the large-scale programme of child-health clinical practice guidelines (CPG) led by the World Health Organization (WHO), with adaptation and implementation by the WHO-Afro regional office and national ministries. Toward this aim, the consortium members have conducted landscape analyses of CPGs for newborn and child health in South Africa, Malawi and Nigeria. These analyses aim to assess the methodological and reporting quality of publicly available CPGs published within the last five years (2017 – 2022) and identify gaps in the topics covered.
The analyses show the importance of ongoing efforts to strengthen capacity and support CPG development in close collaboration with policymakers, researchers and all relevant stakeholders. They also highlight the identified gaps contributing to the burden of disease in newborn and child health in each country, including malnutrition, neonatal and congenital disorders, as well as the coexistence of conditions. These findings were recently published and the three country-specific reports on national guidelines can be found on the Cochrane-Africa website.
