News and Stories
Youth Camps Bring Support Beyond Clinical Care
Camps that bring together young people living with a severe noncommunicable disease are showing that the benefits of integrated care can extend far beyond clinical settings. The first such camps—held this year in Rwanda and Zimbabwe—hosted young people with type 1 diabetes, sickle cell disease, and childhood heart disease.
From Words to Action
The first International Conference on PEN-Plus in Africa provided a platform for health experts, policymakers, civil society organization representatives, donors, people living with noncommunicable diseases, and community advocates to expedite political and financial backing for PEN-Plus.
Network Cohosts National Cardiac Technical Working Group
In May, the NCDI Poverty Network, in partnership with the Rwanda Ministry of Health and with support from Team Heart, launched a national Cardiac Technical Working Group.
Rwanda Makes Strides in Cardiac Care Capacity
This spring, the Ministry of Health of Rwanda offered two weeks of practical training for 24 nurses and doctors from a dozen PEN-Plus district hospitals. The training—provided in partnership with the Network, Team Heart, and Partners In Health Rwanda—focused on the skills needed to diagnose and treat heart failure in rural district hospitals.
What Women Want: Rwanda Study Highlights Women’s Top Health Concerns
Access to care for back pain, food insecurity, and abnormal vaginal bleeding. Overcoming the barriers to care posed by the high costs of transportation to clinic and missing work. Care delivered in a way that respects both dignity and privacy. Those were some of the top healthcare priorities that women in rural Rwanda identified in an International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics study.
PEN-Plus in Action Introduces a Global Partnership to Fight Severe, Chronic NCDs
More than 60 representatives of leading global health policy, technical, advocacy, and financing institutions and people living with NCDs gathered at UNICEF House in New York on September 15, 2022, to introduce the PEN-Plus Partnership, a major international initiative to address the global burden of severe NCDs and injuries that cause more than 500,000 avoidable deaths every year among children and young adults living in extreme poverty.
Rwanda Successfully Pilots Heart Failure Training Model that Will Facilitate PEN-Plus Scale-up Across the Network
A training model that combines in-person classroom instruction with a digital, e-learning platform has been successfully piloted in Rwanda to train PEN-Plus nurses and physicians in the knowledge, skills, and competencies to diagnose and treat heart failure.