Projects – Health Research Foundation Cameroon

Existing- Projects

Rural Diabetes Management Project

This project has been led by HRF researchers working with BUIB as the hosting side for the project. The project in its 8th year is built on a model that uses trained nursing students to diagnose and treat diabetes in rural communities through point-of-care testing. The project has generated three peer-reviewed publications and won external funding from the World Diabetes Foundation in 2018. The funding is meant to expand the project to cover six more rural communities. The Centres for Innovation in Education and Research Development, and Social Accountability and Community Development are collaborating on this project.

Health Professions Education Innovation

This project has been hosted at Biaka University Institute of Buea and is currently in its 10th year. The project has generated innovative changes in curriculum development, faculty development, quality assurance, and community health improvement programmes. These models are being expanded to share with more institutions.

Credential Verification and Fraud Prevention in HPE

This project has been designed to provide academic credentials verification services for health professions and other programmes in Cameroon. When graduates seek academic and professional opportunities abroad, international credential evaluation and verification agencies find it extremely difficult to get credible correspondence from Cameroon.

The Centre for Professional Integrity and Excellence will create a database of all legitimate graduates from targeted programmes. It will also establish formal communication lines with supervising government ministries to obtain direct information on the legal status schools operating under their jurisdiction.

Through this work, including even with professional associations, CPIE will contribute enormously to fight against the phenomena of fake certificates and fraudulent transcripts.

Centre for Positive Ageing (CPA)

Ageing in Cameroonian societies has over the years been recognized as a blessing to both the individual and their family. The elderly people have traditionally been very respected in the families and communities and are always consulted in all family and community matters. However, changes in current times are threatening this age-old culture. Without formal structures to equip individuals and communities with scientific knowledge on the ageing process the public health, education and social systems are not adequately equipped to address the rapidly changing ageing issues in the country.

The Centre, therefore, seeks to lead and support interprofessional and intersectoral projects in the field of ageing. It also aims to promote a positive ageing culture across all demographic groups in the community.

Professionals from HRF developed the first curriculum in Cameroon to train geriatric nurses in BUIB. The successful model was published as a medical education innovation by the Medical Education Journal in November 2013

Congenital Malformation Monitoring Registry

This project is being envisioned to monitor maternal behaviours and pregnancy outcomes, especially in cases of congenital malformations. The goal is to among others, establish a registry can allow researchers access to quality data that can be used to generate evidence-based models to address identified problems.

Promoting Social Accountability in Health Professions Education

HRF researchers collaborated with colleagues at the Biaka University Institute of Buea to develop a student nurse-led model of social accountability in schools for health professions training. The ENACIER (Empower, Negotiate, Assess, Collaborate, Intervention, Evaluation and Report) model includes a short special training prior to deploying student nurses in rural communities for their community health internship. That training prepares the students to be able to mobilise communities to address needs that affect their individual and collective health. Through this, students have been able to mobilise communities to build their own pipe-borne water systems, preserve water catchment, manage diabetes etc.

Introduced since 2012, this model has led to a number of published projects and is now also being introduced into different schools for health professionals. The HRF Centre for Innovation in Education and Research Development is currently working to get as many schools of health professions education to implement the model.

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Health Research Foundation

Aims to conduct research, promote and collaborate education, education and surveillance, as well as socio-cultural projects that promote the wellbeing of mothers and infants. to reduce infant and maternal mortality rates