Adaptations To Strengthen Healthcare Delivery and Resilience to Extreme Weather Events in Southern Africa (ASTRA)

Background

Adaptations To Strengthen Healthcare Delivery and Resilience to Extreme Weather Events in Southern Africa (ASTRA), is a study aimed at using interdisciplinary approaches to propose, prioritize and evaluate feasible interventions to strengthen community and health system resilience to Extreme Weather Events (EWEs) for vulnerable populations living with HIV and/or tuberculosis in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zambia. The study will use a mixed methodology to develop and evaluate interventions to strengthen health care delivery and resilience during extreme weather events in South Africa, Mozambique and Zambia.

Aim

ASTRA study has several objectives, including to systematically engage communities, health service implementers, and policymakers from health determining sectors to prioritise needs and design interventions/adaptations to strengthen health service delivery in the context of EWEs, to undertake community and health service delivery vulnerability and adaptive capacity assessments to establish health related EWE vulnerability baselines. In addition to that, it intends to develop system dynamics models to evaluate the impact of co-created interventions for improving health system resilience, to measure the value for money of identified interventions, as well as to Educate the health workforce about climate change and impact on human health to better prepare them to respond during EWEs.

Methodology

This study uses work packages (WPs) to set up a comparative research implementation process that applies to all three case study countries (Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia). Underlying these WPs model is the mixed method research approach where both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis are integrated, enabling the team to better understand community and health systems vulnerabilities, collaboratively co-create interventions, and evaluate the economic cost of EWEs non-action, among other things. There are five work packages (WPs) as earlier highlighted, conceptualised to enable the study to achieve the aforementioned objectives.

Timeline

The ASTRA study is scheduled to take place over a five-year period, commencing on 1 January 2024 and concluding on 31 March 2028.

Impact

We predict that the findings from ASTRA will inform broader national policy regarding climate resiliency for healthcare systems, leading to potential benefit of the 10 million PLHIV in the study countries and the larger network of family and community that those individuals are rooted in.