Grant: Team Grant: Implem Res on Hypertension in Low/Middle Income Countries

There is insufficient infrastructure in Africa to allow for a rapid of expansion of hypertension awareness, screening and treatment. However, using the infrastructure and lessons learned from the HIV/AIDS epidemic represents an important opportunity to strengthen local health systems by focusing on screening, supply chain management, and treatment and retention in care. Our Team Grant involves country leaders in hypertension from South Africa, Uganda and Rwanda, as well as HIV/AIDS leaders from these countries to create a network of excellence at strengthening the response to both communicable and non-communicable diseases. Our proposed studies involve screening campaigns, modeling the health system requirements of a successful supply-chain, a factorial randomized evaluation of interventions to promote adherence to drugs and retention in care, all in a locally relevant manner that can be scaled up at a sustainable country level. Finally, we aim to build capacity by providing accredited education in supply-chain management.