Mr. Simon Woodworth:

I will speak briefly on our Supporting LIFE project, which is supported by the European Seventh Framework programme, FP7. Supporting LIFE will start on Wednesday next, 1 May. Its purpose is to accelerate and improve the diagnosis and treatment of children between the ages of two months and five years in northern Malawi. One of the problems faced by Malawi, whose population is largely rural, is that many children live in isolated areas which may be number of hours' or possibly days' walk from a clinic or other facility providing medical intervention. As a result, in cases of commonly treatable medical conditions such as pneumonia, malaria, meningitis and diarrhoea, it frequently occurs that by the time the child arrives at the clinic for treatment, he or she will have reached a late stage in the illness. This makes it difficult if not impossible to treat the child and the result is an increase in child mortality.

We propose to implement the World Health Organization's integrated management of childhood illness, IMCI, protocol as a mobile telephone app. While the protocol is very good, it is paper-based and the document looks like a telephone directory. Although often used in hospitals and clinics in Malawi, the IMCI protocol is cumbersome in paper form and is, therefore, ideally suited to be recoded as a mobile app. Members may be surprised to learn that Malawi has a well-developed mobile telephone network and people who do not have shoes often have mobile telephones. The mobile telephone network is growing rapidly on the basis of advanced technology. Malawi already has 3.5G, 3.75G and 4G networks and all the other Gs are coming very quickly. We want to exploit this technology and give the rural health surveillance attendants, who are government-trained, the ability to use the mobile phone app to rapidly diagnose conditions in children aged between two months and five years and get them to treatment quickly. Another benefit of the initiative is that we can also ensure adherence to the WHO protocol and monitor outbreaks of disease in remote areas. Under the current paper-based system, delays of between one and three months in disease reporting occur in rural parts of Malawi, which means that by the time the Ministry of Health hears about an outbreak, it is often too late to do anything practical. We can also use the mobile apps as an educational aid for the health surveillance assistants.

The project kicks off next week. One of the issues we want to deal with is sustainability. We have been fortunate to receive a small structural grant from University College Cork to build a physical research centre at the University of Mzuzu in northern Malawi. We will use this centre as a base for the project and a mechanism for exploring other projects, including capacity-building in education in the university's nursing and midwifery and ICT departments. We are working with the Malawian Ministry of Health to build up decision support systems to enhance its ability to formulate health policy and deal with disease outbreaks.