International blood transfusion consortium T-REC has been holding its final meeting and workshop in South Africa this week.
The consortium is made up of academics and health practitioners working to strengthen the capacity of African researchers to carry out research into blood transfusion and is led LSTM’s Professor Imelda Bates. T-REC works in Ghana and Zimbabwe with academic partners from Denmark and The Netherlands, and is a four-year project from 2011- 2015, funded by EU.
Over the four years of the project has co-ordinated links between academic institutions in the EU and Africa, and transfusions services in Ghana and Zimbabwe. The 1.7 million Euro project has supported two PhD students in each country, provided small bursaries to 60 undergraduate and postgraduate students in local universities who are studying blood transfusion and resulted in 42 professionals working within the two countries being awarded LSTM’s diploma in project design and management.
This final meeting of the consortium has attracted delegates from Europe, and the USA as well as a number of Anglophone and Francophone African countries. It has examined and assessed how the research priorities for blood services in sub-Saharan Africa, set at a meeting in Kenya in 2008, have progressed, as well as looking at the challenges to financially sustaining the T-REC initiatives beyond 2015.
Professor Bates was keen to highlight the importance of the work that had been carried out, talking about facing the challenges of promoting blood transfusion research and building a solid evidence base with which to influence policymakers. She said: “T-REC has been successful in beginning the lifesaving work of building research capacity with the sector of blood transfusion. To ensure that there is an ability to scale-up the T-REC work to other countries, we must all now focus on finding alternative sources of funding that will enable us to continue to build those partnerships that could be crucial in building research capacity in sub-Saharan Africa.”