Last Updated: 13/02/2025
Greater Mekong Subregion Elimination of Malaria Through Surveillance (GEMS)
Objectives
The main goal was to strengthen malaria case management and surveillance to accelerate malaria elimination in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and Vietnam.
The program has five core elements around which the strategy is built:
- Mapping the private sector.
- Comprehensive training and routine supervision to ensure high quality malaria care and data reporting.
- Securing supply chains for quality assured RDTs and first line treatments.
- Establishing routine reporting systems for all suspected and confirmed cases and promoting data use.
- Actively finding and investigating cases.
As the countries of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) continue to make steady progress towards malaria elimination goals, all sectors – public, community, and private – need to be prepared to correctly detect and treat cases. With many people still choosing to seek care in the private sector, engaging private health care providers remains critical to ensure that quality treatment is available wherever people seek care, and that timely, accurate data is shared with National Malaria Programs (NMP).
The Greater Mekong Subregion Elimination of Malaria through Surveillance (GEMS) program has been:
1. Increasing universal access to quality malaria diagnosis and treatment services by supporting and supervising private providers.
2. Bringing care closer to the most at-risk populations by ensuring services are available where they are most needed.
3. Ensuring that national malaria programs (NMPs) have timely access to private sector data to drive decisions through surveillance.
A total of 5,660 private outlets and malaria volunteers in the GMS were supported by PSI by the end of 2019. These outlets included private registered clinics and pharmacies in all countries. In Cambodia, where private health providers are no longer authorized to provide malaria services, Mobile Malaria Workers (MMWs) were stationed on private worksites and in emerging forest-fringe communities. In order to increase the testing and case detection on worksites, PSI piloted reactive case detection strategies on 24 high priority worksites between September 2017 and December 2019.
Nov 2015 — Jan 2020
$21.63M
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