Partnership in the Dominican Republic: A Focus on Community Health
In 2009, building on years of collaboration with leaders in the town of Consuelo, Dominican Republic (DR), CHOP partnered with the Centro de Salud Divina Providencia to establish a flagship pediatric program called NiñosPrimeros en Salud (“Kids First in Health”), or NPS.
The program offers comprehensive pediatric care in a primary care clinic and health education to resource-constrained children under the age of five and their families in the barrios (neighborhoods) of Consuelo. The program is also dedicated to providing opportunities for education, training, and research, for both the community and the next generation of pediatric service providers.
Together, the CHOP Global Health Center and our Dominican partners have developed a model focused on improving child health outcomes through several key, evidence-based pillars:
- Nutrition. The program provides food supplements and education to malnourished children and their families in the barrios. Since the start of the program in 2009, the prevalence of malnutrition among NPS patients has decreased from 10% to 2%.
- Breastfeeding. NPS promotes exclusive breastfeeding in new mothers through peer support groups and home visits during pregnancy and after the birth of the child. Exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months, followed bycomplementary breastfeeding up to two years, is recognized by the World Health Organization as a critical intervention for improving child survival and promoting healthy growth and development for the rest of a child’s life.
- Deworming. Regular deworming treatment is provided to children and their families. In settings where access to clean drinking water and sanitation is limited, parasites are common. When left unaddressed, they can cause diarrheal diseases, a significant cause of malnutrition, and other complications. By administering deworming medication twice per year, the program helps prevent these complications.
- Immunization. NPS ensures timely, routine vaccinations to protect against preventable diseases, including diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and tuberculosis. NPS vaccination rates have gone up from 49% of children in the program receiving all required vaccines in 2009 to over 95% in 2025.
- Anemia. Following a 2015 quality improvement initiative that identified high rates of anemia among NPS children (89%), the team implemented targeted screening, treatment, and family education efforts. Thanks to the hard work of the medical team, together with NPS health promoters, rates have decreased to 37% as of 2025.
Beyond these clinical pillars and goals within NPS, CHOP partners with local hospitals and specialists to strengthen pediatric education and research in the region:
Education: The NPS clinic hosts medical students and family medicine residents from the DR, and pediatric residents from both the DR and CHOP for 1-month rotations in pediatric primary care. CHOP global health fellows based in the DR spend half their clinical time working at NPS alongside Dominican pediatricians. (Read more about the David Pincus global health fellowship here)
Research: CHOP specialists partner with local teams to design and implement innovative research projects that align with local priorities. Projects completed to date have encompassed a variety of domains, from anemia, child development and the acceptability of mobile health tools to modalities for breastfeeding promotion, to incidence of sepsis among children with leukemia, to the immune response to dengue infection, among many others. Read more about these projects here.
Our partner organizations include: