Active and adaptive case finding to estimate therapeutic program coverage for severe acute malnutrition: a capture-recapture study

Coverage is an important indicator to assess both the performance and effectiveness of public health programs. Recommended methods for coverage estimation for the treatment of severe acute malnutrition (SAM) can involve active and adaptive case finding (AACF), an informant-driven sampling procedure, for the identification of cases. However, as this procedure can yield a non-representative sample, exhaustive or near exhaustive case identification is needed for valid coverage estimation with AACF. Important uncertainty remains as to whether an adequate level of exhaustivity for valid coverage estimation can be ensured by AACF. We assessed the sensitivity of AACF and a census method using a capture-recapture design in northwestern Nigeria. Program coverage was estimated for each case-finding procedure.

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