Before joining Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine Professor Joe Valadez was a staff member of the World Bank as the Senior Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist for the Global HIV/AIDS Programme and the Malaria Booster Program for Africa. He also supported Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, and Central Asia.

 

He is an epidemiologist who has worked in more than 50 countries, including Kenya, where he was Director of Projects for the African Medical and Research Foundation, and Rwanda where he served as Senior Health Officer for UNICEF immediately after the genocide. There he helped the new Rwandan government develop a Ministry of Health and addressed priority health problems during their crisis period. He has deep practical experience in planning and managing national and sub-national health programs.

As an epidemiologist, he has advanced the development of rapid and practical programme monitoring and evaluation techniques that adapts quality control statistics from industry, for application in community health programmes. He pioneered the Lot Quality Assurance Sampling method during the mid-1980s while a member of the Harvard faculty. This method is now used internationally.

 

Currently, he is supporting the Republic of South Sudan to establish its national informatics systems. He has been working throughout South Sudan since 2006. His new project is funded by the National Institute for Health Research based in Uganda, Zambia, and Malawi. Its focus is to develop a rapid surveillance system to monitor antimicrobial resistance and its links to inappropriate prescribing practices and antibiotic use in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas. The project will aid Ministries of Health develop strategies to reduce antimicrobial resistance and improve the quality of clinical care.

Joe is interested in developing rapid but rigorous monitoring and evaluation methods for use by local health workers to monitor whether vulnerable people in the community are accessing health services, service delivery targets are being reached, and high-quality health services are being provided by health workers. He is interested in working with health workers to use this type of information to understand barriers to providing adequate health services and to resolve the barriers to improve the quality and coverage of health services.

 

He has worked in several areas of primary health care including those for maternal, newborn, and child health including antenatal care, health promotion, vaccination programmes, breastfeeding, diarrhoeal disease control, malaria prevention and treatment, HIV/AIDS, and nutrition. He has a deep and continuing interest in humanitarian settings.

 

In addition to publishing papers, Joe is interested in writing books and using multimedia to disseminate knowledge. As an experienced public speaker, he is keen to engage both large and small audiences. He supports UNICEF to roll out Lot Quality Assurance Sampling methodology throughout sub-Saharan Africa to support its programme for integrated community case management, and to assess the effectiveness of Child Health Days.

 

He has authored five books including Saving Societies from within, Assessing Child Survival Programs in Developing Countries: Testing Lot Quality Assurance Sampling, Monitoring and Evaluation Social Programs in Developing Countries, and Monitoring and Evaluating Community Health Programs.