The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), led by the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator in the U.S. Department of State, and Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD), a leading global medical technology company, today announced Labs for Life, a new collaboration to help strengthen healthcare and laboratory systems in the developing world along with U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The new collaboration, valued at $20 million, builds on a prior five-year public-private partnership between PEPFAR and BD that focused on improving overall laboratory systems and services in sub-Saharan African countries severely affected by HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.
Labs for Life will include Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia and Mozambique and also expand outside of Africa to India.
A five-year agreement, Labs for Life builds on the success of the initial laboratory strengthening program and will focus on:
In addition to announcing the new collaboration, BD and PEPFAR also unveiled the results of a third-party assessment of their initial laboratory strengthening collaboration. Aligning with PEPFAR’s priority of strengthening health systems, initial collaboration addressed national needs to improve quality and accuracy of laboratory test results to support clinical decision-making for initiation and monitoring patients in Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique and South Africa. Working with Ministries of Health, BD collaborated with CDC field staff to develop a sustainable model integrating technology transfer, local workforce and health infrastructure development.
Assessing the performance of this partnership, Cardno, an external auditing company, reported that countries where capacity-building took place have not only improved the quality of services available to local populations, but also have become regional centers of excellence in Africa.
Program outcomes highlighted in Cardno’s report for HIV/AIDS and TB patients, nearly 200,000 in Uganda and 250,000 in Ethiopia, who are on treatment and care revealed that this partnership:
As noted by Cardno’s evaluation, PEPFAR and BD’s specimen referral and result reporting model has the potential to be replicated in other resource-limited countries to meet national needs for strengthening laboratory systems.
For more information visit www.PEPFAR.gov or contact Anjana Padmanabhan, PEPFAR, 202-330-3225; MarshaVanderford, CDC, (404) 423-2134; Alyssa Zeff, BD, (917) 273-3685.