The objective of this guideline is to present the complete set of all WHO recommendations and best practice statements relating to abortion. While legal, regulatory, policy and service-delivery contexts may vary from country to country, the recommendations and best practices described in this docume...nt aim to enable evidence-based decision-making with respect to quality abortion care.
This guideline updates and replaces the recommendations in all previous WHO guidelines on abortion care
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This report summarizes the World Health Organization’s (WHO) global work on water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) during 2022. It describes how the Organization continued to deliver its essential WASH programming as elaborated in its 2018–2025 strategy.
The ERF provides WHO staff with essential guidance on how the Organization manages the assessment, grading and response to public health events and emergencies with health consequences, in support of Member States and affected communities. The ERF adopts an all-hazards approach and it is therefore a...pplicable in all acute public health events and emergencies.
This version (2024) of the WHO ERF has been developed following extensive consultation across the three levels of the Organization and response experiences over the last five years of emergency response. Key areas have been updated to improve the accountability, predictability, timeliness and effectiveness of WHO’s response to emergencies.
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The WHO End TB Strategy aims to end the global TB epidemic by 2030, in alignment with Goal 3 of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN committed to ending the TB epidemic through adoption of WHO’s End TB Strateg...y and the UN SDGs in 2014 and 2015, respectivel
Almost half of the deaths worldwide caused by TB in 2019 occurred in the WHO South-East Asia Region, home to around a quarter of the global population. Maintaining robust progress in this Region is therefore essential if the global goal of ending the TB epidemic is to be realized. Despite substantial gains made in the Region, the threat to
health worldwide posed by the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to reverse these gains and eclipse the focus on the global TB emergency.
While continuing to tackle COVID-19-related challenges, countries will need to rapidly and urgently deploy supplementary measures to address the large numbers of missed cases, poor treatment outcomes and, potentially, a higher TB burden.
The Regional Strategic Plan towards Ending TB in the Region 2021–2025 clearly articulates priority interventions, analyses the challenges, bottlenecks and opportunities, and focuses on implementation considerations in the Region.
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Rehabilitation in health systems provides recommendations for Member States and other relevant stakeholders to strengthen and expand the availability of quality rehabilitation services. Currently, there is a significant unmet need for rehabilitation services and it is frequently undervalued in the h...ealth system. As populations age and the prevalence of noncommunicable diseases and injuries increases, and the demand for rehabilitation grows, strengthening rehabilitation in health systems becomes ever more paramount.
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Available in English, French and Spanish
This document outlines why and how nurses and midwives are important, not only for individual health optimization but also to achieve the thematic priorities of For the Future. More specifically, it provides case studies to showcase the amazing work that nurses and midwives across the Region are doi...ng to improve health. The document also provides future policy directions to strengthen the scope and leadership of the nursing and midwifery workforce, alongside actions to accelerate investment in their education, skills and employment.
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Epidemics of infectious diseases are occurring more often, and spreading faster and further than ever, in many different regions of the world. The background factors of this threat are biological, environmental and lifestyle changes, among others. A potentially fatal combination of newly-discovered ...diseases, and the re-emergence of many long-established ones, demands urgent responses in all countries. Planning and preparation for epidemic prevention and control are essential. The purpose of this “Managing epidemics” manual is to provide expert guidance on those responses.
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This guide also draws on the standard operating procedures (SOPs) to apply for measles outbreak response
support from the Measles & Rubella Initiative Outbreak Response Fund (17) and includes a section on
measles outbreak recovery so that contributing factors and potential root causes are identifi...ed and
addressed systematically after a measles outbreak. This guide does not aim to be a comprehensive guide
on measles elimination or routine immunization (RI) more broadly.
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The key aim of this guideline is to present recommendations based on a critical evaluation of the evidence on emerging digital health interventions that are contributing to health system improvements, based on an assessment of the benefits, harms, acceptability, feasibility, resource use and equity... considerations.
This guideline urges readers to recognize that digital health interventions are not a substitute for functioning health systems, and that there are significant limitations to what digital health is able to address
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In the mid-1980s, recognizing the limitations of traditional training and that the knowledge and skills acquired are not necessarily applied back in the workplace, MSH developed the Monitoring‐Training-Planning (MTP) approach to assist the Ecuadorian Ministry of Health to implement its Child Survi...val Program. Using the MTP approach, staff me
mbers learn to mobilize their own resources and to improve, incrementally, the management of medicines and other pharmaceuticals at their own facility.
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Enabling young children to achieve their full developmental potential is a human right and an essential requisite for sustainable development. Given the critical importance of enabling children to make the best start in life, the health sector, among other sectors, has an important role and responsi...bility to support nurturing care for early childhood development. This guideline provides direction for strengthening policies and programmes to better address early childhood development.
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This Quick Reference Handbook of Selected Congenital Anomalies and Infections is a companion tool to Birth defects surveillance: a manual for programme managers, and is intended for use by front-line health care professionals who are diagnosing and collecting data on congenital defects and infection...s. When used in conjunction with the manual, the tools in this handbook will help the reader to: identify an initial list of congenital anomalies to consider for monitoring;describe the tools needed to define and code identified cases; define specific congenital anomalies under surveillance.
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