To be able to understand how to best divide up the financial resources available for health care in Malawi, it would be useful to develop a model which is able to mimic the population, their demographics and risk factors, their experience of disease, encounters with the health care system, and the effects on their health of the health care they receive. This Theme aims to create such model.
Our approach of instead using a comprehensive whole system and all-disease model enables the effect of alternative resource allocations of population health to be assessed more directly, and taking account of interactions between the effects of interventions…
Epidemiology and Modelling focuses on developing an ambitious “whole system and all-disease” model for Malawi, which can be used to inform how to allocate resources for health care. None of the questions addressed by Thanzi la Onse could be answered with existing comparable models, which are typically designed to be simple, generic user-friendly pieces of software and will not fully exploit data that are available in a particular setting, nor be geared to answer a country’s particular questions. The Thanzi la Onse model takes a ‘next generation’ approach which, by focusing on Malawi only and by being developed in tandem with Theme 2 on the analysis of the costs and benefits of interventions, and being deeply integrated in the process of decision making explored by Theme 3.
The structure of the model is individual-based, and generates simulated lifetime health, pregnancy and health-care outputs for a sample of the population, accounting for age, sex, exposure to disease risk (e.g. sexual behaviour for HIV, diet for cardiovascular diseases), socio-economic circumstances (which affects risks and availability of interventions), geographic region and distance from health care facilities.
