Healthcare Waste Management Toolkit for Global Fund Practitioners and Policy Makers: Part A
Manual for use in primary care.
This manual explains the theoretical basis and evidence for the effectiveness of brief interventions and assists primary health care workers in conducting a simple brief intervention for clients whose substance use is putting them at risk.
Strengthening health-system emergency preparedness.
This document highlights the key aspects of safe health-care waste management in order to guide policy-makers, practitioners and facility managers to improve such services in health-care facilities. It is based on the comprehensive WHO handbook Safe management of wastes from health-care activities (...WHO, 2014), and also takes into consideration relevant World Health Assembly resolutions, other UN documents and emerging global and national developments on water, sanitation and hygiene and infection prevention and control.
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Non-discrimination disability and ethnic rights
An all-hazards tool for hospital administrators and emergency managers.
The World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe has developed the Hospital emergency response checklist to assist hospital administrators and emergency managers in responding effectively to the most likely disaster sce...narios. This tool comprises current hospital-based emergency management principles and best practices and integrates priority action required for rapid, effective response to a critical event based on an all-hazards approach
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Manual for use in primary care
The purpose of the survey is to identify the level of preparedness required by a health-care facility to be able to continue operating during, or following a conflict-related security event.
The survey method provides a measure of the security and preparedness of a given health facility in it...s specific context. Such a measure offers evidence-based guidance to assess whether urgent action needs to be taken and, if so, in what form.
Decision-makers can prioritize the most effective actions to mitigate specific risks and, eventually, will be able to rank the importance of needs faced by multiple facilities.
The survey covers three modules: the hazards affecting the facility, the current management procedures in place and the state of the physical infrastructure. Each of these modules is further divided into categories, and each category contains the questions – or indicators ‒ that cover the actual issues addressed in the survey. A detailed description of each indicator is provided in this manual.
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This guide is intended for people involved in the management and operation of small- to mediumsized organized water supply systems. The content has been developed with particular consideration for operational-level personnel with responsibility for chlorination (for example, water treatment plant op...erators and technicians). The material presented within this guide may also be relevant for engineers and representatives from public health, local government, non-governmental organizations, as well as any other individuals supporting water safety planning activities for the supply of safe drinking-water.
Part 1. Chlorination principles: Describes key chlorination concepts, providing a knowledge foundation for the implementation of effective chlorination practices.
Part 2. Chlorination practices: Describes the practical application of the concepts presented in Part 1, including calculations and procedures for safe and effective chlorination of drinking-water supplies.
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Policy Brief 2 June 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic is a health and human crisis threatening the food security and nutrition of millions of people around the world. Hundreds of millions of people were already suffering from hunger and malnutrition before the virus hit and, unless immediate action is tak...en, we could see a global food emergency. In the longer term, the combined effects of COVID-19 itself, as well as corresponding mitigation measures and the emerging global recession could, without large-scale coordinated action, disrupt the functioning of food systems. Such disruption can result in consequences for health and nutrition of a severity and scale unseen for more than half a century.
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Since the start of the pandemic, the region has been hit by multiple natural and biological disasters. At the same time, climate change has continued to warm the world, exacerbating the impacts of many of these disasters. The *Asia-Pacific Disaster Report 2021, *also launched today, shows that the p...andemic, combined with the persistent reality of climate change, has reshaped and expanded the disaster “riskscape” in Asia and the Pacific.
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The Strategic Tool for Assessing Risks (STAR) offers a comprehensive, easy-to-use toolkit and approach to enable national and subnational governments to rapidly conduct a strategic and evidence-based assessment of public health risks for planning and prioritization of health emergency preparedness a...nd disaster risk management activities. This guidance describes the principles and methodology of STAR to enhance its adaptation and use at the national or subnational levels.
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The Operational guide: use of referral laboratories for the analysis of foodborne hazards in the Pacific aims to strengthen the food analysis capacity of Pacific Island countries and areas by identifying national and reference laboratories capable of testing for priority foodborne hazards. The Pacif...ic Island countries and areas are often vulnerable to food safety incidents and emergencies due to their geographical distribution and dependence on food imports. The guide outlines key considerations for selecting referral laboratories and submitting samples to them, enabling continuous improvement of food safety systems and providing safe food for all. The target audiences are health and food safety authorities.
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This report presents a framework to link science, policy and practice for a comprehensive assessment of climate mitigation and adaptation investments and their impact on human health.The framework proposes to use weather and climate data to forecast health impacts over time, as well as biophysical a...nd economic models to quantify the outcomes of investments in climate change adaptation and mitigation for relevant sectoral indicators and health co-benefits. It provides guidance on the economic valuation of health co-benefits of climate action, for inclusion in sector-specific cost–benefit analysis (CBA), including the spatial allocation of such costs and benefits.
The framework developed and presented in this study is comprehensive, and provides various entry points for different audiences, including decision-makers in the public and private sectors, researchers and scientists, working in the health sector as well as in other thematic areas and related sectors affected by climate action.
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Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD), mainly heart attack and stroke, is the
leading cause of premature mortality in low and middle income countries (LMICs).
Identifying and managing individuals at high risk of CVD is an important strategy to prevent and control CVD, in addition to multisector...al population-based interventions to reduce CVD risk factors in the entire population.
Methods: We describe key public health considerations in identifying and managing individuals at high risk of CVD in LMICs.
Results: A main objective of any strategy to identify individuals at high CVD risk is to maximize the number of CVD events averted while minimizing the numbers of
individuals needing treatment. Scores estimating the total risk of CVD (e.g. ten-year risk of fatal and non-fatal CVD) are available for LMICs, and are based on the main CVD risk factors (history of CVD, age, sex, tobacco use, blood pressure, blood cholesterol and diabetes status). Opportunistic screening of CVD risk factors enables identification of persons with high CVD risk, but this strategy can be widely applied in low resource settings only if cost effective interventions are used (e.g. the WHO Package of Essential NCD interventions for primary health care in low resource settings package) and if treatment (generally for years) can be sustained, including continued availability ofaffordable medications and funding mechanisms that allow people to purchase medications without impoverishing them (e.g. universal access to health care). Thisalso emphasises the need to re-orient health systems in LMICs towards chronic diseases management.
Conclusion: The large burden of CVD in LMICs and the fact that persons with high
CVD can be identified and managed along cost-effective interventions mean that
health systems need to be structured in a way that encourages patient registration, opportunistic screening of CVD risk factors, efficient procedures for the management of chronic conditions (e.g. task sharing) and provision of affordable treatment for those with high CVD risk. The focus needs to be in primary care because that is where most of the population can access health care and because CVD programmes can be run effectively at this level.
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