SPOON’s work on reducing anemia is featured in this year’s Micronutrient Forum Global Conference. The conference convened experts, practitioners, and policy makers to work towards a world where all people have access to essential micronutrients.
SPOON’s poster, Advancing the SDGs’ Leave-no-one-behind Agenda: mHealth for Delivering an Anemia Prevention and Treatment Program for Children with Disabilities, was co-authored by SPOON board member Dr. Doug Taren, and staff Dr. Zeina Makhoul, Kate Miller, and Jon Baldivieso. The poster shares results from a program to determine how a digital health application can be used in low-resource settings to improve nutrition for children with disabilities.
Children with disabilities, particularly those with feeding difficulties, are more likely to be malnourished and also face significant barriers to accessing nutrition services. To overcome these barriers, SPOON created Count Me In, a digital health application that supports caregivers to identify and treat nutrition and feeding problems. Count Me In guides caregivers to assess and monitor the anemia status of children with disabilities, recommends steps to treat iron-deficiency anemia, and allows them to track progress over time.
The poster shared results from children with disabilities who had been assessed at least once with Count Me In. Data show that anemia attributed to iron deficiency decreased by 54% after caregivers implemented recommendations from Count Me In. SPOON’s data suggest that Count Me In establishes a path to improving nutrition outcomes for children with disabilities by providing their caregivers with a structured process and clinical recommendations tailored to each child’s individual needs. Count Me In is also positioned to fill a crucial data gap around nutrition for children with disabilities, improving decision-making and accountability for governments and civil society to address the needs of this population.
