ALMANACH: Adamawa government takes action to lower child mortality in Nigeria

The government of Adamawa State has begun the process of expanding the computerised diagnosis protocol for serious paediatric illnesses to five other states.

Adamawa, the first state in the nation to adopt the protocol known as Algorithm for the Management of Childhood Diseases (ALMANACH), opened a train-the-trainers workshop for 30 doctors and other health officials on Thursday. These individuals will travel to the five other states to spread awareness of the ALMANACH application to health officials.

Kano, Kaduna, Taraba, Gombe, and Yobe are the five states.

The Executive Chairman of Adamawa State Primary Health Care Development Agency (ADSPHCDA), Dr. Suleiman Bashir, declared the train-the-trainer workshop open on Thursday. He said the training is the realisation of a decision made during the previous National Council of Health meeting in Imo State where Adamawa presented the project, ALMANACH.

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The project is being scaled up to five other states that have expressed a strong interest in implementing the innovation, according to Dr. Suleiman. “The meeting adopted that digital healthcare is the way to go,” he stated.

He clarified that the meeting on Thursday in Yola served as an orientation for the team that will visit the five states to set the stage for the execution of ALMANACH.

He claims that ALMANACH is essentially a process for diagnosis operated on an app that enables medical professionals to conduct prompt consultations and diagnostics.

The protocol is an electronic decision-supporting system that improves use of IMCI (Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses), which ALMANACH has adopted and developed into an algorithm that runs on an application on Android devices, according to Dr. Ibrahim Sahabo, Programme Manager of ALMANACH, who also spoke at the beginning of the training in Yola.

Sahabo noted that it is an e-health project used by health officers and set up on a tablet computer.

Dr. Apollos Nachanuya, a senior lecturer at the Modibbo Adama University Teaching Hospital in Yola and one of the instructors for the train-the-trainers workshop, said ALMANACH is a crucial advancement in light of the high mortality rate for children under five in Nigeria.

The discovery, according to Dr. Apollos, “helps primary health centres especially to diagnose common killer diseases in under-5, especially malaria of which we have a high burden.”