M-HIRST Internship Call 2024

Baylor College of Medicine Children’s Foundation Malawi is one of the main PEPFAR care and treatment partners in Malawi and has managed multiple cooperative agreements with USAID for over 10 years. BCM-CFM via the Tingathe program and in cooperation with the Ministry of Health, supports HIV prevention, care and treatment focused efforts in five districts and 96 health facilities in Malawi.

The M-HIRST intern will work with the Research and Strategic Information/Monitoring and Evaluation division and Programming division. Together these divisions support research, quality improvement (QI), and evaluations to improve Baylor-Malawi’s PEPFAR supported HIV and AIDS prevention, care and support and treatment and cross-cutting programs.
We seek a candidate who will help support the program to develop, implement and evaluate programming to improve integrated care of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as hypertension and depression among PLHIV to reduce morbidity and mortality. We are looking for a dynamic and flexible individual who is interested in further developing their skills in program implementation and evaluation.

Assess the quality of care and outcomes of patients admitted with advanced HIV disease in Neno district Malawi Currently, Neno District Health Office is following the national guidelines for the management of advanced HIV disease. Since introducing these guidelines, the district has not evaluated the adherence to these guidelines and outcomes of patients admitted with advanced HIV disease. We would like to host an intern who can conduct a review of causes of admission among patients admitted with advanced HIV disease, assess the quality of care provided to these patients, and determine the outcomes of patients admitted with advanced HIV disease. The review will focus on patients admitted at the two hospitals in Neno district. Partners In Health will support the intern in data collection, analysis and local dissemination to improve practice. Depending on the outcomes, APZU will support the intern with the academic dissemination of the findings.

Possible projects include:

• 1. Patient and program characteristics associated with HIV prevention, HIV testing and linkage into care, ART initiation, PMTCT, and differentiated service delivery and patient health and behavioral outcomes including seropositivity, retention in care, disease progression, mortality, viral suppression, and re-engagement in care after becoming lost to follow-up (LTFU).
• 2. Patient and program characteristics associated with TB screening, diagnosis, prevention, active and latent TB treatment and patient outcomes including completed treatment, cured, transferred out, treatment failure, defaulted, and died.
• 3. Patient and program characteristics associated with cervical cancer screening, diagnosis, referral, treatment, and patient outcomes.
• 4. Implementation approaches and related expenditures of HIV, TB, and cervical cancer prevention, screening, testing, and treatment activities and associated patient outcomes.

• Improving HIV prevention among heterosexual men seeking STI services in Malawi: examining the feasibility, acceptability and associated costs of a systems-navigator-delivered integrated prevention package.
• Integrating enhanced HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis into a sexually transmitted infection clinic in Lilongwe

Using Implementation Science to Accelerate a Path to Scale for Injectable Prep in Malawi: A Pre-implementation Study. this pre-implementation study will assess client and provider preferences and use them to design responsive, scalable, and practical service and demand creation models that can be tested through implementation science approaches. The main objectives of this pre- implementation study are:

• Objective 1a: To assess pre-implementation provider and client preferences for injectable PrEP delivery that will provide insights on how best to integrate injectable PrEP into existing health systems and explore the barriers and facilitators to scale up.
• Objective 1b: To empirically develop effective and scalable demand generation approaches for injectable PrEP, that function to attract our focus populations to injectable PrEP, and actively engage them in seeking out and using the product. Activities to ensure service delivery models will enable effective use will happen under Objective 1a.

• Project 1 : A pragmatic randomized control trial (RCT) to determine the impact of two-way texting (2wT) on patient retention in Two High-Burden Public HIV Clinics in Urban Lilongwe Broad Objective: To determine if the innovative two-way texting mHealth intervention can significantly increase retentionon ART among PLHIV, reducing patient tracing workload.
• Project 2: Community-based ART REtention and Suppression (CARES) App for quality ART patient care in outreach settings in Lilongwe, Malawi.
  Broad Objective:

JHP was the first biomedical HIV research institution in Malawi and has more than 30 years of experience. We conduct HIV clinical trials, observational studies and, more recently, implementation research on HIV and co-morbidities. Our scientific infrastructure includes a research laboratory, research pharmacy, data department and study clinics. Together, with our partners, we strive to improve HIV care, treatment and prevention policies and practices in the region through high quality research, community engagement and capacity building.

The M-HIRST Intern will work in one of three areas depending on their passions, skills and career goals:

• 1. Quality management. Learn the importance of the QA/QC process in research. Help think of creative solutions to improve the way we implement quality management through checklists, job aids, review transcripts, incentivizing good quality standards across departments, revolutionizing the way SOPs are tracked and timed.
• 2. Research Ethics Compliance: Compile and submit study related documents for ethics review including progress reports. Support monitoring compliance to study ethical provisions.
• 3. Research communications. Designing materials to educate HIV research stakeholders. Maximizing website and social media reach. Evaluating quality of communication. Adapting research communications to different types of stakeholders.
• 4. Research administration. Dive into the essential skills of grants management including understanding research budgets, communicating with technical teams, generating research reports, developing templates for essential documents and innovating the processes that are at the core of research support and operations.

Desirable qualities include basic knowledge of HIV science and basic understanding of what research is; strong verbal and written English and Chichewa; core computer skills (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF); willing to accept feedback and constructive critiques; and self-motivation.