The Gelia Castillo Award for Research on Social Innovations in Health (GCARSIH) is a national award presented by the Philippine Council for Health Research and Development (PCHRD) and the Department of Health (DOH), in collaboration with SIHI Philippines. GCARSIH aims to recognize the outstanding social innovations that address persistent, societal and health system challenges in the Philippines. SIHI Philippines acts as the secretariat for GCARSIH. The second GCARSIH in 2022 received 82 entries across the Philippines and selected three top innovations and seven finalists promoting effective, meaningful, and sustainable solutions to complex challenges in health care.

Case visits were conducted to each of the selected social innovations in 2018 and the case studies along with the case videos are now available to read, watch and download.

See more below.

As part of the Master in Public Health program of the Department of Health and the University of the Philippines Manila  College of Public Health for Doctors to the Barrios (DTTBs), about 160 DTTBs serving in various rural and remote areas in the country participated in the rollout of SIHI Philippines’ introductory module on social innovation in health in August 2019. In the same month, we also facilitated the module with over 60 students from the UP Manila School of Health Sciences Main Campus in Palo, Leyte. The introductory module is intended to give practicing primary care physicians, community health workers, health educators, and students an alternative lens to improving health care in the Philippines.

 The SIHI Philippines Hub was selected by the WHO Country Readiness Strengthening Department to develop a Community Engagement Package. This draws on the experiences of the WHO and partners in working with communities and provide a learning resource for public health practitioners and organizations. The package has three components: 1) Database of experiences on community engagement in different settings, 2) Community engagement learning package (consisting of four online modules) based on the database and 3) Community engagement workshop package based on the database. SIHI Philippines collaborated with the SIHI hubs in Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Colombia, and Honduras for this project.

Read more here.

SIHI Philippines was commissioned by the WHO Country Office in the Philippines to conduct a research entitled “Assessment of health service delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic and introducing innovative solutions for an extended service delivery platform under the new normal in health care.”

The project seeks to deepen the understanding of the demand-side of the health system during the COVID-19 pandemic and to co-create an evidence-informed health system delivery platform to improve access to primary health care services. The project is divided into two phases. The first phase includes a rapid assessment and analysis of community members’ needs, preferences, values, and behaviors regarding their experiences with the current healthcare system during the pandemic. The second phase involves co-creation and pilot implementation of an extended health service delivery platform facilitated by innovative solutions to deliver essential health services aligned with the ongoing universal health care implementation.

From July to December in 2021, we led the implementation of a community engagement self-monitoring (CE-SM) strategy in two community-managed social innovations in the Philippines. The implementation sites are the Innovations for Community Health, Inc. for Kalinga Health, which focuses on TB care, and the municipality of Del Carmen, Surigao del Norte for the Seal of Health Governance, which is a community health leadership and monitoring programme. The CE-SM project aims to empower communities to monitor processes in social innovations by developing a community grounded and contextualized self-monitoring approach.

Key findings show that the proactive leadership of community leaders and the active participation of community members significantly contributed to the success of the CE-SM strategy. Regular feedback sessions were seen as important, not only as a means of monitoring progress, but also for boosting the community members’ morale.

From July to December 2022, we led the implementation of the second phase of the CE-SM strategy in the Seal of Health Governance, evaluating CE-SM’s sustainability and practicality, while examining the factors and processes at play in its implementation in two barangays (villages) in Del Carmen, Surigao del Norte.

We co-facilitated a training workshop for the Department of Health Region IV-A’s Telemedisina sa Timog Katagalugan”(Telemedicine for Southern Luzon) project on 14 to 16 November 2022. Representatives of rural health units, district hospitals, and provincial hospitals from the provinces of Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon participated in the activity.

Since 2020, we have been partnering with The Center for Tropcal Medicine of Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in advancing social innovation and implementation research in both countries. In 2021, we also partnered with DERBI Foundation in Bangalore, India, and SESH in China to collaborate as SIHI hubs in Asia.