Cape Town Global Health Network, 3rd Meeting, Final Report

PAN UNIVERSITY NETWORK FOR GLOBAL HEALTH (PUNGH)

THIRD MEETING REPORT   (PDF Version)

UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN
CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA
12-13 OCTOBER 2015

Delegates from five universities and government representatives at the 3rd meeting of the Pan University Network for Global Health

SUMMARY

The two day network meeting hosted by the University of Cape Town included presentations of the first round of pilot funded projects, engagement with local government representatives, and in depth discussion of network activities and structure.

Network members agreed to consolidate future membership to prepare for the possibility of adding other universities in the future and develop a more equitable decision-making process. The six champions of the actively involved institutions (founding partners) will meet quarterly and act as a steering committee for future network activities. The next round of pilot funding will consolidate projects around the network’s two central themes (1. Urbanization and health and 2. Multimorbidities) and include funding to begin an engagement/ education project.

The next network meeting will be held in Pune, India in 2016.

ATTENDEES

University of Cape Town

  • Olufunke Alaba
  • Anna Coussens
  • Mohamed Jeebhay
  • Mamadou Kaba
  • *Tolu Oni (organizer)

Pennsylvania State University

  • Michael Adewumi
  • Collins Airhihenbuwa
  • *Rhonda BeLue
  • Rob Crane
  • Reni Elewonibi
  • Alison Gernand
  • Brian King
  • Caprice Knapp
  • Dana Naughton
  • Margaret Winchester (network coordinator)

University of Freiburg

  • Sonia Diaz-Monsalve
  • PUNGH 3RD MEETING REPORT PAGE 3
  • Richard Gminski
  • Rebekka Mumm
  • Michael Wirsching
  • *Ursula Wittwer-Backofen

University of Limpopo

  • *Hans Onya
  • Linda Skaal

University of the West Indies

  • *Alafia Samuels

Savitribai Phule Pune University

  • *Deepti Deobagkar (unable to attend)

*Indicates Institutional Champion

DAY ONE, MONDAY 12 OCTOBER 2015

Highlights

  • Morning remarks and welcome
  • Special address from Dr. Beth Engelbrecht, Head: Western Cape Department of Health
  • Seed grant presentations
  • Display of posters from Cape Town- Freiburg project on urban health
  • Meeting with government stakeholders

Morning remarks

The meeting was started with welcoming remarks from Porf Tania Douglas, the Deputy Dean of Research for the Faculty of Health Sciences at UCT and Prof Mohamed Jeebhay, Head of the School of Public Health and Family Medicine at UCT.

Dr. Collins Airhihenbuwa informed the network that he will be leaving Penn State, as of 1 January 2016, for a position at Saint Louis University as Dean of the College for Public Health and Social Justice. Dr. Rhonda BeLue, who has been involved in the network since its inception will be replacing Collins as the interim director of the network beginning in January.

Special address from Dr. Beth Engelbrecht, Head: Western Cape Department of Health

Facilitated by the UCT organizers, Dr. Beth Engelbrecht gave a talk about the state of the health Department in the Western Cape. She emphasized their patient-centered approach and two priority areas: 1) the first 1000 days, from conception to age two and 2) management of chronic conditions. They are also actively engaging and training community health workers to integrate care.

Seed grant presentations

The six seed grants funded through the network in December 2014 shared their work to date and plans for the future to showcase current network activities.

  1. Strengthening Health Systems for Chronic Care: Intersection of Communicable and Non-communicable Diseases Services in SA – PSU (BeLue), UL (Onya) and UCT (Oni)
  2. Development of a multidisciplinary network of established and emerging scholars on migration, urbanisation and health in southern Africa. – PSU (Matthews), UCT (Oni & Adams)
  3. Obesity Paradox: Body Mass Index and Mortality in US and Asian Older Adults. – PSU (Gao), SPPU (Deobagkar, Sahni, Tambe, Nagarkar), Hebei Union University and Kailuan Hospital (Wu)
  4. Identifying Urban Transition Priority Areas for Mother and Child Interventions in Cape Town. – PSU (Knapp), UCT (Oni), UF (Wittwer-Backofen), SPPU (Deobagkar)
  5. The Impact of Urbanization on Vitamin D Deficiency and Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes.  – PSU (Gernand), SPPU (Deobagkar, Ashma, Jeyakumar), UCT (Coussens and Davids)
  6. Intersection of HIV/AIDS and CNCDs, focusing on Cardiovascular Diseases (CVDs): Creating Collaborative Teams – PSU (Francis), UWI (Samuels), UCT (Oni)

Questions and discussion following the seed grant presentations covered the following themes:

  • What are some of the issues with the language of conducting interdisciplinary/ multidisciplinary work?
  • What are the upstream and downstream effects that we are studying?
  • What is the difference between studying “patients” and “populations”?
  • How can we evaluate engagement in research projects?
  • What are some of the structural drivers of the issues being studied?
  • What are some strategies for using difficult-to-obtain data in research?

Government Stakeholder Meeting

In the afternoon, network members engaged in conversation with government representatives about their work, the needs of the Western Cape region, and points of intersection between policy, practice, and research. In particular, the recently released Strategic Plan presents many opportunities for translating research to practice in the region (https://www.westerncape.gov.za/documents/plans/2015 ).

SA stakeholders

Western Cape Department of Health

Beth Engelbrecht; Head of Department

Anthony Hawkridge; Director: Health Impact Assessment Directorate

Western Cape Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning:

Gottlieb Arendse; Chief Director: Environmental Quality

Joy Leaner; Director: Air Quality management

Western Cape Department of Transport and Public Works

Hector Elliott; Chief Director: Road Safety coordination

Western Cape Department of the Premier

Tristan J Görgens; Policy and Strategy Analyst: Policy and Strategy Unit

Western Cape Department of Human Settlements

Tracy Jooste, Director: Policy and Research

Cape Winelands District Municipality

Gabriël de Klerk; Environmental Health Practitioner

DAY TWO, TUESDAY 13 OCTOBER 2015

Highlights:

  • Discussion of network-related and network-sponsored activities
  • Recommendations for a new steering committee and model for membership
  • Development of guidelines for second round of pilot funding

Objectives:

  1. Come together to create cross-national knowledge and innovation transfer between and within global North and South universities.
  2. Conduct capacity building, research and training activities around methodological, conceptual research activities based on network research themes.
  3. Develop a pipeline of early career, postgraduate and student researches trained to conduct interdisciplinary research characterized by cross-national knowledge and innovation transfer.
  4. Generate practice-based evidence and advocacy through stakeholder engagement

Rules of Engagement:

All network activities should be collaborative from inception and through all stages.

Definition of a Network Project:

  1. A project that resulted from network funding or
  2. Projects that were submitted to the Champions for approval, and other partners were invited to collaborate and move the project forward
  3. Network enabled projects are projects such as student theses or other papers/grant work that occurred due to proximity of network members or something that flows out of network projects.
  4. Network enables projects should be document as they were made possible because of the Network. They can become an official network project by following 1) above. Champions will discuss the details of the process at the next call.

Membership:

Membership-resources and Process Recommendations:

  1. All 6 participating Universities will be referred to as foundational members. The language about “core” institutions will be left in the past with the first phase of seed grant funding.
  2. The 6 champions from each of the foundational institutions will serve on an Executive Committee that will advise the Director and Network Coordinator (and other appropriate personnel)
  3. New members will have to apply for consideration. The Executive Committee and leadership will evaluate these applications on behalf of the entire network
  4. Potential new members have to meet criteria that span the research, teaching, and administrative areas (these are spelled out in more detail below)
  5. The Executive Committee and Network leadership is charged with ensuring there is a diversity of membership from geographic regions, type of institution, discipline represented…etc.
  6. The Executive Committee will play in role in setting the agenda for future international meetings.

In terms of the application process, the following were suggested as criteria that could be included:

  • The application should come from a person self-identified as the champion for the considered institution. Successful applications will have a team of interested people from that institution. It is not expected that they will have worked together previously, as the network might serve as a mechanism for new collaborations
  • Successful applications will come from a team with diversity in their disciplinary orientation
  • There should be a letter of support from the institution, ideally from a high-ranking administrator
  • The champion and other members should attend the meetings whenever possible
  • The application should have a statement that there will be an attempt to secure funding from the considered institution at some point. This could be used to fund their travel to the meetings or support future seed grants. A commitment of funding is not required for consideration of membership in the network
  • The application should describe the strengths and weakness of the group as they relate to the two topical areas (urban health and NCD-CD)
  • The application should describe how the group will contribute to research, education, and capacity building, and benefit from participating in the network in these areas. This will show how participation with the network will advance the network’s mission and that of the participating institution.

It was recommended that by the next quarterly meeting the champions would reflect on their home institutions to ensure that the expectations for members, as expressed in the application, are met by the 6 foundational members.

Pilot Funding

The groups discussed that pilot funding should lead to external funding in order to facilitate network sustainability.

Penn State will contribute $50,000. This money will be divided among the two themes to focus on scaling up and combining currently funded projects, plus one additional open call for training and capacity-building proposals.

$20,000 for a project related to urbanization. Investigators from round 1 urbanization projects met to combine their projects into one. Discussions will continue in preparation for the call for pilot 2 proposals.

$20,000 for a project related to multimorbidity. Investigators from round 1 multi-morbidity project met to combine their projects into one. Discussions will continue in preparation for the call for pilot 2 proposals.

$10,000 for a project related to training/education and outreach. An open call with ideas related to this topic will be released in November.

The call for pilot funding will request 1) Scientific objectives/content 2) Potential external funding opportunities 3) Resources that each investigators respective university will contribute to the pilot funding activities

Reni Elewonibi (PSU): melewonibi@gmail.com has volunteered to help search for funding opportunities.

Website

Meg has been working on an interactive website where all members can create research profiles, share data, and update the group with their information. Penn State has agreed to fund the first two years of the site and then the network will need to find a sustaining source.

FUTURE PLANS AND WAY FORWARD

Meetings:

  • Quarterly meetings will be held with the six champions via Skype
  • The next annual meeting will be held in Pune in 2016. UWI has offered to host the 2017 meeting in Barbados
  • Quarterly email updates will be sent out via email newsletter format. Requests for contributions will be requested on a quarterly basis. Conferences, manuscripts or funding opportunities of interest or project updates can be included in the email.
  • Champions will discuss issues of network-sponsored and network-related activities, as well as guidelines for engagement among members
  • Future meetings will consider potentially using a three-day format and continue to engage local stakeholders

Evaluation:

  • The network has to document outputs and outcomes so that we can provide evidence that the financial contributions are with the investment
  • Rhonda will send out a logic model that can guide ongoing evaluation and reporting for input from all network members
  • We will evaluate collaborative processes as a team in an ongoing basis to ensure inclusion among the member universities

Seed grant funding

  • The call for proposals will be sent out by the end of 2015, after discussion among the six institutional champions

Other

  • Members indicated that they are open to changing the name of the network. Ideas are welcome
  • If all universities are on board, we will proceed with signing of the network MOU to facilitate future funding applications