Integrated Management of Childhood Illness

A case-management strategy developed jointly by the World Health Organization and UNICEF beginning in 1992 and formally launched in the mid-1990s, addressing the major causes of death in children under five, including pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, measles and malnutrition, through a single integrated protocol rather than separate disease-specific programmes. Its guidelines train first-level health workers to assess a sick child's combination of symptoms, classify severity, and either treat at the clinic or urgently refer, while also addressing immunization status and caregiver counseling in the same visit. More than 100 countries have adopted some form of the strategy. Rigorous evaluations, notably the Multi-Country Evaluation published in the 2000s, found real gains in health-worker practice and care quality but effects on overall child mortality that were smaller and harder to isolate statistically than the strategy's early advocates had hoped.