Swiss TPH Awarded New Grant for Early Career Researchers

The Botnar Research Centre for Child Health (BRCCH) has announced five new research projects around the topic of child health within their Postdoctoral Excellence Programme (PEP). One of these projects has been awarded to Swiss TPH, with the aim to enhance and test an electronic clinical decision support tool for young infants in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). “The aim of the tool is to improve the quality of care for sick young infants in LMICs,” said Tracy Glass, group leader at Swiss TPH. “The tool could have a big impact on the well-being of this extremely vulnerable and understudied group. We will evaluate the effectiveness of this tool to improve the quality of care and therefore the clinical outcomes of young infants in five LMICs.”

Electronic Clinical Decision Support Algorithms 

Almost half of all deaths in children in the first five years of life occur in the neonatal and early infant period. Electronic Clinical Decision Support Algorithms (eCDSAs) can help guide health workers in appropriate and evidence-based patient evaluation and management, and have the potential to make an immense benefit in improving clinical care for young infants.

“This grant allows us to use machine-learning methods to enhance an electronic clinical decision support tool for young infants within an already existing project at Swiss TPH, “Tools for Integrated Management of Childhood Illness study (TIMCI),” said Gillian Levine, Postdoctoral fellow at Swiss TPH. “I’m looking forward to working with Tracy and benefiting from her group’s experience in order to further develop my analytical skills while contributing to the development and testing of an exciting technology that has the potential to improve clinical outcomes for sick young infants in low-resource settings.”

Postdoctoral Excellence Programme

PEP aims to foster the next generation of scientific leaders who will pursue interdisciplinary research to address critical unmet needs and challenges in global paediatric health. Within PEP, researchers will implement highly translational and ambitious research proposals. Out of the 15 proposals submitted, five projects were selected for full funding with a combined budget exceeding CHF 5 million.