ENN Special Supplement on Community-based Therapeutic Care

This supplement presents a collection of articles written by people who have been involved in Community-based Therapeutic Care (CTC) programmes. The contributions come from Valid International’s CTC research and development team, operational agencies implementing CTC programmes, independent practitioners and academics involved in the research and development of CTC. There has been substantial accumulated experience of CTC over the past four years (see Table 1). Many of these programmes have included specialised research inputs from anthropologists, food technologists, health systems specialists, ethicists, economists, statisticians, epidemiologists and sociologists providing a wide range of evidence-based perspectives on CTC.

The supplement aims to provide a broad range of opinions and experiences of CTC to inform a wide audience about the CTC model of intervention and its relationship with other humanitarian interventions. In presenting these perspectives, we hope to define clearly what CTC is and how it works, clarify CTC’s relationship to Centre-based Therapeutic Feeding, and clarify the differences between CTC and other more recent models of Home-based Treatment. The supplement aims to share some of the difficulties and lessons we have learnt during the process of developing the CTC approach and also presents some of the initial monitoring data collected from CTC programmes.