Categories
Featured Work - Awareness & Advocacy

Let’s Test Toolkit

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed global gaps in testing for communicable and noncommunicable diseases, and these gaps disproportionately affect individuals and families in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs). A staggering 81% of the population in LMICs don’t have access to many of the most simple tests available (Lancet, 2021).1

UNICEF has responded to this global gap in testing by developing the “Let’s Test” Toolkit, which aims to support Advocacy Champions in their goal to increase the use of quality testing in their own communities, through both increased supply and demand generation. This Toolkit, utilizing evidence based strategies,  provides step-by-step guides and assets to support impactful and productive engagement with policymakers to advocate for increased supply of quality testing. Communications assets, facilitation tools, memorable info-bites and content for social media campaigns are also provided to drive informed community-level demand and use of quality testing in LMICs.

The “Let’s Test” Toolkit has been informed by research in five LMICs and was designed with consideration for global health best practices for engagement, advocacy and social behavior change communication (SBCC). Practical guidance is also included to enable users of the Toolkit to tailor advocacy and communication assets for specific country and community contexts. 

Access the Toolkit here to learn more: lets-test.org.

1 Lancet Commission on Diagnostics: transforming access to diagnostics (2021)

Categories
Add Resources - Research & Development

Collaborations lead to apps, toolkits to collect COVID-19 RDT data

Collaboration between organizations is essential to quickly design and develop human-centred health tools to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. The list below is a collection of various applications and toolkits developed in this way to capture COVID-19 related data.

  1. The COVID-19 Template App, designed by FIND and Dimagi, supports health workers as they administer and record the results of COVID-19 antigen rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs). The application features workflows for patient registration, test initiation, and result capture. 
  1. The RDToolkit: Currently Supported RDTs is a listing of the RDTs that the Rapid Diagnostics Tookit hosts.
  1. FIND and HISP India collaborated to develop a DHIS2-based package for capturing data for RDTs. The resultant COVID-19 RDT Data Capture programme metadata package is available for download.
  1. As part of the ACT-Accelerator, Argusoft added a novel digital health solution to enable RDT capture with FIND. This COVID-19 RDT Data Capture is a MEDplat extension.
  1. ODK partnered with FIND to create a ready-to-use form to help community health workers in collecting data when performing RDTs. Read more on the COVID-19 Antigen RDT form for standards-compliant data.
  1. Medic’s CHT App with COVID-19 RDT Workflows is a community health toolkit to enhance RDT workflows. It also was developed in partnership with FIND. The app is powered by the Community Health Toolkit (CHT).