Grant: Team Grant - GACD Intervention scale-up - Hypertension and/or diabetes

The Cardiovascular Health Awareness Program (CHAP) is a community-based, volunteer-led cardiovascular risk assessment and blood pressure monitoring program with health education/promotion sessions for older adults living in the communities. CHAP was tested in Canada and has produced consistent results of improving cardiovascular outcomes. The Community Health Assessment Program in the Philippines (CHAP-P) is an adaptation of CHAP to low and middle income countries (LMICs), integrating diabetes risk assessment. Through consultations, some research studies, with the inclusion of Philippine and international stakeholders, the CHAP-P intervention was demonstrated to be acceptable and feasible to the setting. This current study aims to determine scale-up processes for implementing an expanded CHAP-P intervention one Region in the Philippines. Previous work focused in a few towns in selected municipalities of the Zamboanga Peninsula Region, Philippines. This scale-up aims to spread across the entire Region, a population of 3.6 million. This region is similar to the setting of other LMIC that has isolated areas, poor roads, several ethnic and linguistic groups, and scarce health resources. The scale-up process will include a team of partners and collaborators from the Philippines and other countries including lay volunteer health workers, researchers, health professionals, public health officials, and politicians. We will conduct several meetings to present CHAP-P; discuss the needs to prepare for its implementation including preparing materials and equipments, personnel training, and cost-sharing; and set-up ways to monitor and evaluate CHAP-P so that the community residents can benefit from the program more. We will document how CHAP-P was scaled up, identify barriers in the process and solutions to overcome them, and produce a guideline on how to scale-up CHAP-P so that other Regions in the Philippines and other countries can use what we learned in this process.