For health professionals in low and middle income countries independent, evidence-based, therapeutic information, is often not available or prohibitively expensive. One of CKN’s most widely used resources, Therapeutic Guidelines, is helping give back to countries throughout the region with their Therapeutic Guidelines Developing Countries Program.
The program was established to support the quality use of medicines and development and distribution of guidelines in low and middle income countries. Running since 2007, the program currently has granted over 500 people in 38 countries a free subscription to Therapeutic Guidelines’ digital platform, eTG complete. Institutional subscriptions for Fiji National University and the National University of Samoa are also making Therapeutic Guidelines available to the next generation of health professionals in the Pacific region.
In addition to free resources, the program provides regular clinical updates tailored for low resource settings, local guideline development support, and an annual visiting editor fellowship program at Therapeutic Guidelines’ Melbourne office.
In May 2018, the program launched the Guideline Host app. This app was developed to fill an important gap in low and middle income countries - making local guidelines easily accessible for health practitioners at the point of care. Without dedicated staff or resources, committed local health professionals invest a lot of time in developing guidelines. However barriers to printing and distributing hard copies often result in poor dissemination, and therefore poor usage of these guidelines.
The Fiji Guideline Host and Solomon Islands Guideline Host apps were launched in May and received an overwhelmingly positive response. So far over 600 individuals have downloaded the app, which represents a large proportion of health practitioners in the two countries.
“Having access to multiple local treatment guidelines on ones’ phone anytime improves the efficiency and effectiveness by which a Solomon Islands health workers can treat their patients and thus improve the quality of care they provide, ” says Dr Rooney Jagilly, Medical Superintendent, National Referral Hospital, Solomon Islands.
“I would like to thank Therapeutic Guidelines Ltd for their kind assistance in supporting us in this regard.”
Plans to develop new apps for three more countries in 2019 are now underway.
For more information about Therapeutic Guidelines Foundation, visit www.tgfl.org.au