TAHNIAH PROFESOR MADYA DR. MOHD ZULFAKAR BIN MAZLAN TAJAAN GERAN INTERNATIONAL ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY MALAYSIA (IIUM)

Welcome has awarded a 3-year grant for the Collaboration for Research Implementation and Training in Asia and Africa (CCAA) project. Led by the MORU Malaria & Critical Illness Department, with country clinical investigators taking a central role, this project brings together an investigator-led community of practice working in patients with critical illness from 15 low- and middle-income countries in Asia and Africa. In the previous phase of the project, The Wellcome-MORU supported CRIT Care Asia (CCA} platform, a multinational collaborative network of ICUs was established, and a locally led acute and critical care registry was implemented, which communicate near-real time clinical and operational data from over 200 partner healthcare units. These registries have already contributed to data-driven disease surveillance, clinical trials and service improvement initiatives during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Acute and critically ill patients and healthcare providers in Asia and Africa are expected to benefit from CCAA. The outputs of this project directly align in vision with both the priorities of the national registry stakeholders, and the WHO roadmap to 'strengthen health systems and enable high quality data driven research in LMICs'. The project provides the foundations of a multinational learning health system. These include delivering a multinational data research hub which will safely curate epidemiological and treatment data on critically ill patients from the global south, providing high-impact and scalable care improvement interventions, informed by quantitative and qualitative data on processes of care, and generating new evidence through registry-embedded clinical trials.