Bless Zoshe
Buea, Cameroon
Health workers from Buea, Tiko, Limbe, and Muyuka health district have been trained on the use of Rapid Diagnostic Tests for malaria.
The one-day seminar targeted essentially laboratory technicians and nurses, took place on Monday March 25, 2013 at the Regional Delegation of Public Health, Buea.
According to the facilitator of the training Dr Dorothy Fosah Achu, malaria diagnosis has been a problem in recent years because of changes in the guidelines on how to diagnose the disease.
RDT seminar participants
“Initially, diagnosis was based on clinical assessment; it was presumptive. But today, we are more and more aware that malaria is no longer as common as before because we have done a lot of work on prevention.
However, since there are still fever cases, we want to differentiate between which is actually malaria, and what is caused by viruses and other infections. So the guidelines we are trying to promote today is to use confirmatory tests either rapid tests or microscopy to confirm any suspected case before we treat,” Dr Achu emphasized.
She went on to say, in the past, microscopy was the main method of malaria diagnosis. But since the introduction of RDTs in 2012 through the Southwest Special Fund for Health, they realized that the quality of microscopy was not very good.
Dr Dorothy Achu, RDT Resource person
“We noticed that the health facilities are not ordering enough RDTs because they are not used to this new tool of diagnosis. They still continue using microscopy. We are aware that the quality of microscopy they are doing is not very good. They still need training, and we will come back to train them on good quality microscopy. We expect that after this training, participants will understand the benefits of Rapid Tests, use it, and make others use it especially in the peripheral areas,” Dr Achu added.
Further discussions during the meeting centred on topics such as some general notions on malaria, demonstrations on how to interpret rapid diagnostic tests results, stock management of RDT kits, as well as other group tasks.
After Buea this March 25, the same training would be carried out for health workers in Kumba, Mamfe, and Mundemba. It is expected that by the end of March 2013, laboratory technicians and nurses in all 18 health districts in the Southwest region would have been schooled on the use of Rapid Diagnostic Tests for malaria.
