Slummapping

Our ongoing slum mapping project is part of a large-scale international collaboration entitled the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Global Health Research Unit on Improving Health in Slums. Our research unit will focus on health services in slums.

Our objectives are:

1. To map current health services and facilities and understand how these are used in nine slums across Asia and Africa.
2. To build on these maps to identify costs associated with how health services run in each site including informal providers, such as traditional healers, and the quality of these services as well as identifying costs to the patient and their households.
3. To systematically update our knowledge on: a) Disease prevalence in slums; b) Current healthcare provision models in slums and elsewhere in cities to include services which help to prevent disease; and, c) General literature on financing and the design of health services in low and middle income countries.
4. To generate viable options for health service delivery in slums and cost these options relative to likely benefits.
5. To work with decision makers and slum communities in designing the models of health service delivery, with a view to a subsequent evaluation of effectiveness and costs of viable options.

Further to the above plan of work we aim to:

a) Build a research programme which survives after our NIHR funding ceases; and to create a platform of funded activities into the future.

b) Develop capacity and communities of practice by involving people who can change things in slums, including politicians, civil servants and people who live in slums.

The following are some links to the project:

1. Brief summary of the Geo-spatial Mapping of Health Services in Slums project: https://www.nihr.ac.uk/funding-and-support/documents/global-health/units/RLilford-Plain%20English%20summary.pdf
2. Blog for the mapping component of the project: http://blogs.cim.warwick.ac.uk/slummapping/
3. Slum mapping team at the University of Warwick:
   1. João Porto de Albuquerque (Professor): [1]
   2. Godwin Yeboah (Senior Research Fellow) [2]
   3. Philipp Ulbrich (Research Assistant): [3]
   4. Vangelis Pitidis (Research Fellow): [4]