Report on the Review of the Integration of Community-Based Management of Acute Malnutrition into the Ghana Health System, August/September 2010 (2011)

Until 2007, the Ghana Health Service (GHS) addressed the needs of children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) in nutrition rehabilitation centers. These centers did not follow the then-standard World Health Organization (WHO) treatment protocol for the management of SAM and did not provide specialized therapeutic foods for children with SAM.

As part of initiating the Community-Based Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) approach in Ghana in 2009, a Severe Acute Malnutrition Support Unit (SAM SU) was established by the GHS to provide technical assistance countrywide as CMAM scaled up. The SAM SU provided day-to-day guidance to the regions and districts on all aspects of CMAM. With guidance from the SAM SU, Severe Acute Malnutrition Support Teams (SAM STs) were formed to plan, manage, and provide technical support at the regional and district levels. Each region has commenced CMAM service implementation in one or two districts within a limited number of outpatient care and inpatient care sites. These sites will serve as learning sites for the region to inform gradual scale-up to other districts in the region.

The SAM SU requested FANTA-2 to conduct a review of CMAM activities at the learning sites, including plans for scaling up. The objectives of the review were to assess the integration of CMAM services into the learning sites, assess learning sites’ performance, review recent plans and initiatives to scale up CMAM in Ghana, and provide recommendations for strengthening those plans.

Support for the reviews was provided by USAID/Ghana and the USAID Bureau for Global Health’s Office of Health, Infectious Diseases, and Nutrition.

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