USAID Health Care Improvement Project (HCI) | Zambia

USAID Zambia asked the Health Care Improvement Project (HCI) to provide technical assistance to the Zambian Ministry of Sport, Youth and Child Development, implementing partners, and the U.S. Government in Zambia to improve the quality of services offered to vulnerable children and families affected by HIV. The project will focus on building consensus among stakeholders on standards for the quality of care these stakeholders provide.

Additionally, HCI is assisting several organizations to define roles for community health workers (CHWs) and providing support for CHW supervision, forms and systems, and performance evaluation tools. This assistance will help assess CHW program functionality and document evidence of changes that lead to improvement. It will also help determine whether improvements in program functionality enhanced CHW engagement and performance. 

Read more about the HCI project or visit http://www.hciproject.org/.

• Develop and implement standards for services to vulnerable children, and incorporate quality improvement principles and methods in OVC programming
• Incorporate OVC standards of care into the national OVC strategy
• Gather and communicate evidence on draft service standards
• Develop 1) job aids to support implementation of standards at the point of service and 2) tools to rate essential guidelines and those on dimensions of quality
• Develop a scale-up plan for quality improvement in OVC programs in organizations and regions not reached during the pilot
• Create a community of learning across OVC stakeholders