Research and Advocacy

Every homestead where families have been screened has been mapped as part of the Health in Every Hut programme. More than 8 000 homesteads have been screened since June 2013 impacting on some 45 000 people in a deeply rural area.

Over and above the positive impact the implementation of Health in Every Hut has had on some of the poorest and most vulnerable communities in the Eastern Cape, the programme is serving as a laboratory to test the roll-out of the South African government’s policy for Re-Engineering of Primary Healthcare (RPHC).

Four academic papers covering a range of lessons extracted from the implementation of HiEH are in preparation.

• One examines the gap between policy as conceptualised by national government and experiences on the ground.
• The second draws on clinical data from HiEH to investigate hypertension and diabetes in rural and urban areas.
• The third shines the spotlight on dementia in rural areas of South Africa.
• The fourth paper in preparation looks at issues of adherence to diabetes, hypertension and HIV treatment in the project area.

These papers will be available for download in the near future.