Dr. Anthony Danso-Appiah
Senior Lecturer, School of Public Health, and Director (UGCESP)
contact info
adanso-appiah@ug.edu.ghAbout
Bio - Dr Anthony Danso-Appiah, BSc, BSc, MSc, DSc, PhD
Dr Anthony Danso-Appiah is an Epidemiologist with over 20 years of experience in evidence-based approaches for effective health care delivery and national health systems strengthening. Anthony worked for the Centre for Review and Dissemination (CRD), University of York, UK as Research Fellow in Evidence Synthesis, The National Collaborating Centre for Women’s and Children’s Health (NCC-WCH), London as Research Fellow in Clinical Evidence and Methodologist and Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine as West Africa Co-ordinator in Evidence generation and promotion across countries of West Africa. Anthony prepared several systematic review Evidence Briefs, using critical appraisal skills, published on the DARE database for access by healthcare professionals and the general public. He was involved in Health Technology Assessment (HTA), assessing cost-effectiveness of interventions and technologies to be introduced in the National Health Service (NHS) and spent a number of years investigating health interventions in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), using various tools and evidence-based methods whilst based in the Department of Public Health, Erasmus Medical Centre Rotterdam. He prepared a systematic review and meta-analysis (Danso-Appiah and De Vlas 2002) that became pivotal to the WHO’s recommendations for the adoption of mass drug administration (MDA) for the WHO Preventive Chemotherapy (PC) strategy for schistosomiasis control. His Cochrane review (Danso-Appiah et al. 2013) won the prize during the Cochrane 20th Anniversary Celebration Conference held in Cape Town, South Africa in 2013. Anthony served as Advisor to one of Campbell Collaboration’s highly rated systematic review and network meta-analysis on mass deworming to improve developmental health and wellbeing of children in low-income and middle-income countries. He has done a number of WHO-commissioned systematic reviews including leading the evidence generation for the first WHO evidence-based clinical guideline for schistosomiasis control. Currently, he is involved with synthesizing context-specific evidence in a series of systematic reviews on communicable and non-communicable diseases to inform national and global policies.
Anthony worked in the health industry and academia in the Netherlands and UK and moved to Ghana to help to set up the University of Ghana Centre for Evidence Synthesis, which was accepted as a member of the Global Evidence Synthesis Initiative (GESI) Network that builds capacity to advance innovative, evidence-driven, context-sensitive and policy-relevant research across Africa and low and middle-income countries (LMICs). He also set up the Africa Communities of Evidence Synthesis and Translation (ACEST), a Foundation supporting capacity building in quality evidence generation and translation into policy and practice across Africa and Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) and helped introduce Evidence Synthesis into the University of Ghana’s curriculum at the Doctoral level, and developed the Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) programme, a CPD credit awarding programme for the Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons’ Residency Training Programme to help increase Evidence-based Medicine capacity of doctors in decision making levels.
Anthony has served as WHO Advisor and Consultant spanning a period of almost 15 years, has been a plenary speaker at several international scientific conferences. Anthony has served on several National and International Advisory and Technical Boards and committees and he is a member of a number of international scientific working groups.