Patan Academy of Health Sciences (PAHS) is an autonomous, not for profit, public academic Institute dedicated to improving Nepal’s rural health. The Academy was established in 2008 with the mission to train and produce competent and committed health professionals to serve the poor & underserved populations, especially in the remote and rural areas.
PAHS is located in the city of Lalitpur, adjacent to the capital city Kathmandu. It has three schools: School of Medicine (Est. 2010), School of Nursing & Midwifery (Est. 2016) and School of public Health (Est. 2017).
Patan Hospital is the major teaching hospital of PAHS and the Academy uses several government Primary Health care centres and District level hospitals as its distributive teaching-learning sites for undergraduate and postgraduate medical, nursing and public health students. The Academy is working closely with the government health system and has served as a model of innovative medical education and social accountability in a developing country which can be replicated elsewhere.
Patan Hospital It is a 650 bedded tertiary level hospital which caters around 360,000 outpatients, 41000 Emergency Room visits and 20,500 inpatients annually. The Paediatric Research unit of the Academy has been conducting various researches on vaccine preventable diseases in children, in collaboration with University of Oxford since 2005.
Patan Academy of Health Sciences (PAHS) has become part of the DIAMONDS network since 2021. It was also the site for PANDIT (Pneumonia Aetiology in Nepal: Diagnosis with Immunology and Transcriptomics) study which is a part of PEFORM.
As part of the DIAMONDS activity PAHS is recruiting (since Sept 2021) children with infectious diseases with a focus to those infections common in South Asia and not seen across the European sites. Some of the targeted conditions for recruitment are atypical infections like Rickettsial infections, tropical diseases like Dengue and Typhoid along with culture confirmed pneumococcal diseases, emergent pathogens like SARS CoV2 and neonates with suspected sepsis and meningitis.
We are recruiting admitted children as cases and collecting blood samples at enrolment (time point 1) for all the cases and where possible at time point 2 (48-72 hours of admission) and a convalescent sample at 6-12 weeks post admission (time point 3). We are also collecting the time point 1 blood samples from age and sex matched controls. Nasopharyngeal swabs from cases with respiratory samples are also being collected. The collected samples are being stored and shipped to the DIAMONDS designated laboratories in Europe.
Patan Hospital, PAHS runs 23 different clinics serving more than 350,000 patients every year. The Paediatric clinic of the hospital runs 6 days a week and serves around 23,000 children per year with many referrals from all over the country. There is a dedicated Research clinic for consenting, recruiting, sampling and/or vaccinating and following up different study participants.
PAHS has a well functioning laboratory with Microbiology, Biochemistry, Clinical Pathology, Histo-cyto pathology and Molecular Pathology (immuno-histochemistry, PCR) units. The lab has automated, semi-automated and manual instruments. A PCR (semi-automated) lab has been established more recently, during the pandemic.
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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 848196