Strategies to improve treatment coverage in community-based public health programs: A systematic review of the literature

摘要

Many public health platforms provide decentralized interventions outside of health facilities, including mass drug administration for neglected tropical diseases, immunizations, vitamin supplementation, and others. The purpose of these community-based public health platforms is to reach large proportions of populations in need with important preventative healthcare. However the platforms require high treatment coverage of targeted populations in order to achieve health impact. And, in many cases, targeted populations are low-income, rural, and hard to reach with large health campaigns. The purpose of this systematic review is to evaluate strategies for achieving high treatment coverage in public health service distribution programs. We identified nine different strategies used to increase coverage of distribution programs. Community-directed distribution was associated with the largest increase in treatment coverage. Similarly, incentivizing distributors also had a strong influence on increasing treatment coverage. These findings have important implications for governments, implementers, and funders who aim to provide health services at scale.