No publication date indicated.
The Health Sector Policy gives general orientations for the sector which are further developed in the various sub-sector policies guiding key health programs and departments. All health sub-sector policies will be updated in line with this new policy. The Health Sector Policy is the basis of nationa...l health planning and the first point of reference for all actors working in the health sector. The overall aim of this policy is to ensure universal accessibility (in geographical and financial terms) of equitable and affordable quality health services (preventative, curative, rehabilitative and promotional services) for all Rwandans. It sets the health sector’s objectives, identifies the priority health interventions for meeting these objectives, outlines the role of each level in the health system, and provides guidelines for improved planning and evaluation of activities in the health sector. A companion Health Sector Strategic Plan (HSSP) elaborates the strategic directions defined in the Health Sector Policy in order to support and achieve the implementation of the policy, and more detailed annual operational plans describe the activities under each strategy.
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Ghana is attracting global attention for efforts to provide health insurance to all citizens through the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). With the program’s strong emphasis on maternal and child health, an expectation of the program is that members will have increased use of relevant servi...ces. The NHIS does appear to enable pregnant women to access services and allow caregivers to seek care early for sick children, but both the quantitative and qualitative assessments also indicated that the poor and least educated were less likely to have insurance than their wealthier and more educated counterparts.
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Child friendly spaces (CFS) have become a widely
used approach to protect and provide psychosocial
support to children in emergencies. However,
little evidence documents their outcomes and
impacts. There is widespread commitment among
humanitarian agencies to strengthen the evidence
base of pr...ogramming. Recognizing this, the Child
Protection Working Group (CPWG) of the Global
Protection Cluster and the Inter-Agency Standing
Committee (IASC) Reference Group on Mental
Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency
Settings have identified research in this area as a
high priority.
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A review of current literature and up date data from the field, April 2015.
This report has been published in part in J Hosp Inf. 2015;90:1-9.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=ebola+nosocomial+shears
Environmental Research Letters
Microplastic debris floating at the ocean surface can harm marine life. Understanding the severity of this harm requires knowledge of plastic abundance and distributions. Dozens of expeditions measuring microplastics have been carried out since the 1970s, but they ha...ve primarily focused on the North Atlantic and North Pacific accumulation zones, with much sparser coverage elsewhere. Here, we use the largest dataset of microplastic measurements assembled to date to assess the confidence we can have in global estimates of microplastic abundance and mass. We use a rigorous statistical framework to standardize a global dataset of plastic marine debris measured using surface-trawling plankton nets and coupled this with three different ocean circulation models to spatially interpolate the observations. Our estimates show that the accumulated number of microplastic particles in 2014 ranges from 15 to 51 trillion particles, weighing between 93 and 236 thousand metric tons, which is only approximately 1% of global plastic waste estimated to enter the ocean in the year 2010. These estimates are larger than previous global estimates, but vary widely because the scarcity of data in most of the world ocean, differences in model formulations, and fundamental knowledge gaps in the sources, transformations and fates of microplastics in the ocean.
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The audit was undertaken in order to ascertain whether allocations and donations received directly by the Government of Sierra Leone, in the fight against the Ebola Virus Disease were utilised with due regard to economy and efficiency and that internal controls were observed accordingly. The audit f...ound that more than US$ 10 million in spending was inadequately documented and US$ 6 million may have been diverted to non-existent or “ghost” workers. The Quote: “It makes one wonder how a serious humanitarian crisis was used as money-making machine,” said Ibrahim Tommy, coordinator for Sierra Leone’s Centre for Accountability and Rule of Law
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