Improving Children’s Medicines

The lack of appropriate pediatric drug formulations presents serious global health challenges. Due to a lack of pediatric formulations for many essential medicines, healthcare workers must often dispense adult dosage forms with instructions on how to achieve the desired pediatric dose. In order to guide the creation of optimal formulations of pediatric medicines, more data are needed about how parents/caregivers, patients, and providers manage illness, and what their preferences would be to improve adherence to treatment.

An interdisciplinary team of Dartmouth faculty and students from medicine, medical anthropology, and pharmacology are working with collaborators at Muhimbili University to conduct a survey in Tanzania of patients’, caregivers’, and health care workers’ understanding of and preferences for medicines for children.

Promoting Healthy Environments

Recognizing that health extends beyond medicine, GHI has fostered collaborations with Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering and the University of Dar es Salaam College of Engineering and Technology, along with the Jane Goodall Institute and local organizations in rural Tanzania to design and implement sustainable sanitation and alternative fuel systems to protect threatened water supplies and to reduce deforestation in rural Tanzania. Click here to view a short animation about GHI’s environmental health efforts.