KUPUMUA project - Partnership working/Capacity building projects to prevent and treat chronic lung disease in East Africa with the Makerere University Lung Institute, Uganda

Dr Rupert Jones from the Peninsula Medical School secured GCRF funding in 2018. Read how GCRF funds were key to the research

This project focused on the following:

The cultural adaptation in Uganda of pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) with dance, singing and music as a motivator for participation, leading to changes in the way PR is delivered in Africa.
Producing culturally-adapted illustration materials, which were developed in collaboration with the University of Plymouth Illustration students. These materials, including an animated film, were used to educate rural communities in Uganda about the dangers of biomass smoke exposure.
Dr Jones and his team partnered with the Makerere Lung Institute to link the University's MSc Global Health programme and other courses being delivered in Uganda, in partnership with Makerere University.

Benefits and impacts of the project

`The project has helped prevent lung disease in pregnant women, young children and adults due to education on the issues now being adopted more widely in Africa.
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Low-cost, high impact pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) programmes for treating people with lung diseases is now being adopted globally via the RECHARGE programme, funded by NIHR.
<A toolkit is being established to introduce PR to Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
~Chronic lung diseases particularly affect the poorest people in the poorest countries, contributing to health inequalities and disrupting communities. This research has been taken up widely across the globe to try and tackle that problem.
@The GCRF funding also enabled qualitative research to further inform long-term impact of the biomass smoke education, the findings of which are being written for publication.

Project collaborators

To enable us to spread our key messages, this project cemented long-term collaborations and partnerships with the following organisations:

Makerere Lung Institute, Kampala, Uganda.
District Health Office, Jinja, Uganda; UK Uganda Health Alliance.

The Kupumua project has been nominated for the Times Higher Education Awards 2020 International Collaboration of the Year by Andrew Merrington. Shortlisting is on the 10th September 2020.

Patients at a chronic lung disease rehabilitation centre in Kampala, Uganda

Next steps

A meeting in Uganda is planned for 2020, which will include both the Plymouth and Makerere teams, the Ministry of Health and District Health teams to discuss a nationwide roll-out of a biomass smoke education programme.
The Ministry of Health met recently to discuss final plans for the Community Health Extension Worker (CHEW) curriculum to be rolled out in January 2020 throughout Kenya as part of Universal Health Coverage.
During the next trip to Uganda, there will be follow up work for PR, looking at how the dance/singing/music element is being incorporated, including interviews with patients and stakeholders.
There is a larger NIHR-funded project, RECHARGE, which will use the lessons on cultural adaptation of PR in 4 fully-powered randomised control trials in Kyrgyzstan, Sri Lanka and India.

The Smoke Monster animation, by Illustration student Angus Ulyett, has been adopted by the Ministry of Health in Kenya as an education tool to help Community Health Extension Worker (CHEW) training following a recommendation from the World Health Organization.

There are also plans to use the animation in other countries including Uganda, Cameroon and Ghana through Clean Air Africa project (WHO, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and Governments of Ghana, Kenya and Cameroon).