Research

Research is a growing activity at LAMB as we are located in an area of significant poverty, with many health and development issues. The high quality of technical and research capabilities make us unusual in such a rural area.

The continuum of care that LAMB operates in, from village to community clinic to hospital allows for integrated research into existing field work. We have access to households, neighbourhoods and villages as well as clinics and hospitals. There is a wealth of community and hospital health data available, linked to socio-economic status and enabling equal analysis.

The Information and Research Department aims to:

• Provide resources and support tools for LAMB to participate in research and to disseminate research results

• Improve LAMB’s ability to do research by developing a pool of staff with a variety of research skills

• Develop systems to monitor ongoing work

• Ensure that research is done in a way that respects subjects

Our range of research includes maternal child health, non-communicable and communicable disease, health service access and outcomes, development, and justice issues.

The largest proportion of the research currently carried out is community focused. Research staff spending considerable time on data collection in village communities, followed by collation and quality control of data, analysis, and presentation.

Read more about LAMB’s research programmer

Qualitative Research

An example of research into perceptions and decision-making is a study called: Social Closeness, Helping and Neglect: Examining the Roots of Favoritism in Rural Bangladesh. It assesses how individuals and groups perceive closeness in relationships. It is hoped this will contribute to understanding how to increase collaborative local initiatives which can help overcome exclusion and social barriers to health.

Data Sets

Interested Public Health researchers and students of epidemiology or statistics could help improve health and health systems through analysing a wide range of information stored on LAMB servers.

Community

We have more than 13 years of compiled data on maternal and under 5 years child health outcomes, including antenatal care, birth attendant, and mortality.

Verbal autopsy data is available for causes of maternal and under 5 deaths. Including data on health care providers seen, place of death, and narratives of family perceptions of cause of death and social factors around the time of death. Financial records of income and expense of 20 union-level community clinics are available since 2008.

Hospital

Data on discharge diagnoses of approx 7,000-10,000 patients is available per year since 2006, including kala-azar, typhoid, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases; indicators for cesarean sections, clinical indicators for pre-eclampsia and eclampsia, obstetric fistula surgical repair patients and records of system for targeted subsidy allocation.

Health System

There are rich opportunities for operations research related to implementation of rural primary-health-oriented health systems, including hospitals applying appropriate technology and low-cost care; community-financed community clinics; ethics and values input to training and holistic clinical practice.

For more information about research partnerships with LAMB, contact research@lambproject.org