£1.3m project will design healthcare that reaches men who travel for work
A research team at Queen Margaret University (QMU) led by Professor Karina Kielmann has been awarded £1,296,283 by the Novo Nordisk Foundation to drive a 4.5year international programme aimed at closing a critical gap in global health: delivering care to highly mobile men in subSaharan Africa who struggle to access continuous treatment for non-communicable and infectious co-morbidities.
The Health Innovations for Mobile Men (HIMM) project will work directly with truck drivers, traders, fishermen and seasonal labourers in Uganda and Zambia, individuals who may suffer an undiagnosed burden of diabetes, hypertension and HIV but whose livelihoods require frequent travel and make access to clinic based care challenging. Rather than adapting patients to services, the project will codesign services with these men, by investigating the spaces and mobility routes that are relevant for their daily lives, and accompanying them to map health seeking behaviour and service bottlenecks.
Researchers will use participatory methods, crowdsourcing and “research on the move” approaches to develop practical interventions such as mobile screening services, peer-to-peer support networks and digital technology enabled care coordination. The work will be led from Queen Margaret University and delivered by an international consortium that includes Makerere University (Uganda), Zambart (Zambia), Umeå University (Sweden), the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp (Belgium), the Institute of Development Studies UK and Lund University (Sweden), with early career researchers from Uganda and Zambia playing central roles.
Health-related research with mobile populations in east and southern Africa has tended to focus on migrants and refugees and on sexual health issues, including HIV. Men who travel for work in the region and across borders are often neglected not only in research but in health service provision which conventionally focuses on women and children. By codesigning solutions with the men affected and with health providers, we can develop services that are accessible and travel with them, from community-based health points of care to mobile screening and digital care coordination.
The project represents a response to the growing need to tackle noncommunicable diseases alongside infectious diseases in areas where there is rapid social and economic change. Its codesigned interventions will be piloted in communities and evaluated for scalability and policy relevance, with outputs intended to inform service design and health policy in resource constrained settings and beyond.
Karina said: "This work is relevant to Scotland and the wider UK where rural, seasonal and shift working populations also fall through gaps in continuity of care – and in line with the recent government initiative to support a men’s health framework. The HIMM project will generate evidence and practical tools that policymakers and health services can adapt to improve access and equity for under-served mobile men at home and abroad."
The award funds fieldwork, codesign workshops, pilot testing and policy engagement over the next four and a half years, with preparatory work due to begin in autumn 2025 with community engagement and mobility mapping in the two countries. The team says results could transform how health systems respond to increasingly mobile populations worldwide, offering a transferable model for equity-centred health innovation.
For further information contact Maggie Wright on +44 (0)7801 710360 or email magie.wright@mwa.co
