Prof. Grace Irimu appointed as the new Head of Department of Paediatrics and Child Health

Professor Grace Irimu has been appointed as the new Head of Department of Paediatrics and Child Health. She brings on board her wealth of experience in health systems and implementation research. 

She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health. Prof. Irimu has been working tirelessly for decades to reduce Kenya’s under-5 mortality rate and has been instrumental in developing and disseminating Kenya’s Ministry of Health Basic Paediatric Protocols, ETAT+ (Emergency, Triage, Assessment and Treatment plus admission care). The programme has been scaled up across Kenya, and beyond the country’s borders to Uganda, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe. ETAT+ has become so impactful and considered such essential training that the scheme has been added to the curricula for both undergraduate and medical graduate programmes as a taught, and examinable, course in Kenya.

She is Currently also Co-Principal Investigator and Country Lead for  the NEST360° program.  NEST360° is a  multi-organisation partnership including the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Rice University’s Rice 360° Institute for Global Health in the US, and the Malawi College of Medicine, as well as leading institutions across Africa which includes the KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme (KWTRP). 

The Newborn Essential Solutions and Technologies (NEST) project addresses these gaps through three approaches: Innovation to optimize a package of rugged, affordable technologies for quality, comprehensive newborn care;Access by using evidence to generate large-scale demand for technologies and developing new distributions systems for their affordable delivery; and Sustainability by educating a pipeline of clinicians and biomedical innovators who can lead systems change to improve