First Annual CEBHA Symposium held in Kampala, Uganda

The first Annual Symposium of the Collaboration for Evidence Based Healthcare in Africa (CEBHA) was arranged by the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) and Makerere University and held on the 24th of November in Kampala Uganda with 80 participants from 8 African countries.

KIT has invited partners to a Collaborative project with an objective of strengthening the health care delivery and health systems through research, capacity building and implementation of Evidence Based Health Care in Africa. The partners come from Universities and Medical Schools in Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Malawi, Zimbabwe and South-Africa. In Europe KIT has joined forces with WHO Geneva and Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.

The symposium was led by Professor Harriet Mayjanja, Dean of the Medical Faculty at Makerere University in Kampala. The first part was devoted to presentations of some of the latest research findings from Uganda about topics like Malaria resistance, Prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDS and Vaccination strategies for HPV.

The second part was about the methods and processes of Evidence Based Health Care and topics like Searching for evidence, Developing systematic reviews, Grading of Evidence, Guidelines development, Teaching EBHC and Disseminating the Evidence were included (see here for detailed programme).

Throughout the Symposium there was active participation from the audience and at the end there was a panel debate about the way forward for EBHC in Africa with representatives from the South African Cochrane Center, Makerere University, Ministry of Health in Uganda and KIT.

A common conclusion was that this is a very welcomed initiative; it is a good timing due to the technological developments in Africa and it is a necessity to utilize the best available evidence to improve the health care delivery in a cost-efficient manner and to strengthen health systems in some of the most resource constrained countries of the world.