Resources

One of the critical actions to improve health outcomes and save lives is to augment the public health system’s capacity to reliably deliver oxygen. The public health systems in India have historically relied on oxygen cylinders to meet the medical oxygen demand. As a result, there were very few trained personnel who understood the complexity of integration and maintenance of newly deployed oxygen systems and knew how to manage them. This training module was developed by PATH to provide training relevant to ITI trainers and biomedical engineers working at national, state, district, and health facilities to understand the operations and maintenance of oxygen or respiratory equipment.

As states in India are rapidly setting up oxygen systems, there is a growing gap between the facilities with newly installed oxygen systems and the availability of accredited laboratories to test and certify the quality of oxygen produced from this equipment and approve them for commissioning and use. This training module developed by PATH provides training relevant to oxygen sample preparation that is critical for medical use.

PATH has created a set of eleven posters or job aids intended to support health care service providers and other personnel involved in the operation and maintenance of medical oxygen equipment, such as oxygen cylinders, oxygen concentrators, pressure swing adsorption (PSA) oxygen generation plants, liquid medical oxygen (LMO) storage tanks, and medical oxygen conversion charts. These job aids provide guidelines on how to operate the equipment and the safety and mitigation measures that need to be adhered to when dealing with medical oxygen.

The Training of Trainer (ToT) module on “Basics of Oxygen Management System”, developed by PATH, is meant for providing training to those participants who, by the end of the course, are expected to effectively oversee the oxygen ecosystem at their respective levels. This ToT module is relevant to oxygen program managers at national, state, district, and health facility levels to understand the components of medical oxygen management and use this information for informed decision making.

Increasing the ability to share and view rapid diagnostic testing dataThis report provides a template of data fields specifically relevant to the COVID-19 RDT (rapid diagnostic test) workflow, called the “ACT-A COVID-19 ANTIGEN RDT DATA MODEL”. The intention was to accelerate the development and deployment of a set of minimum functionalities with a minimum dataset (designed specifically for the project), incorporating data exchange and format standards, for the collection of COVID-19 data. This model is aimed at supporting LMIC partners in the collection of COVID-19 antigen RDT results at a decentralized level for use in patient care, disease surveillance, supply chain management, and as relevant, other use-cases related to pandemic responses.