Research priorities to support the development of integrated national strategies to control skin-neglected tropical diseases

Skin-presenting Neglected Tropical Diseases (skin-NTDs) impose large burdens on affected people, their families, and communities. The NTD Roadmap 2021-2030 presents an important strategic plan to guide collaborative, multisectoral action to overcome these burdens, and sets out ambitious targets to control, eliminate and/or eradicate skin-NTDs by 2030. One of the Roadmap’s cross-cutting targets is for 40 countries to adopt and implement integrated skin-NTD strategies by 2030, intended to ‘reduce morbidity, disability and the psychosocial impacts of debilitating skin-NTDs’. Despite high-level support for integrated skin-NTD control, only four countries were implementing integrated skin-NTD strategies in 2020. Challenges include the operationalization of Roadmap goals into national strategies and interventions, and the translation of global targets into country-level indicators. In this analysis paper, we characterise the key knowledge gaps to the development of in-country integrated skin-NTD strategies centring on four thematic areas, and summarise operational research priorities to address these challenges. We draw on the experience of NTD Programme Managers in several NTD-endemic countries and the collective views of participants at a session entitled How to Develop a Country Integrated Skin-NTD Strategy- Identifying and Filling the Research Gaps, held at the 2021 annual meeting of the Coalition for Operational Research on NTDs (COR-NTD). The operational research priorities identified are intended to support the scale-up of integrated programming for skin-NTDs.