Compendium of Case Studies
This is the sixth of our 11-paper supplement entitled “Community Health Workers at the Dawn of New Era”. Expectations of community health workers (CHWs) have expanded in recent years to encompass a wider array
of services to numerous subpopulations, engage communities to collaborate with and to... assist health systems in responding to complex and sometimes intensive threats. In this paper, we explore a set of key considerations for training of CHWs in response to their enhanced and changing roles and provide actionable recommendations based on
current evidence and case examples for health systems leaders and other stakeholders to utilize.
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For the primary health worker in a low/middle-income country (LMIC) setting, delivering quality primary care is challenging. This is often complicated by clinical guidance that is out of date, inconsistent and informed by evidence from high-income countries that ignores LMIC resource constraints and... burden of disease. The Knowledge Translation Unit (KTU) of the University of Cape Town Lung Institute has developed, implemented and evaluated a health systems intervention in South Africa, and localised it to Botswana, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Brazil, that simplifies and standardises the care delivered by primary health workers while strengthening the system in which they work. At the core of this intervention, called Practical Approach to Care Kit (PACK), is a clinical decision support tool, the PACK guide. This paper describes the development of the guide over an 18-year period and explains the design features that have addressed what the patient, the clinician and the health system need from clinical guidance, and have made it, in the words of a South African primary care nurse, ‘A tool for every day for every patient’. It describes the lessons learnt during the development process that the KTU now applies to further development, maintenance and in-country localisation of the guide: develop clinical decision support in context first, involve local stakeholders in all stages, leverage others’ evidence databases to remain up to date and ensure content development, updating and localisation articulate with implementation.
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This rapid compilation of data analyses provides a ‘stock-take’ of social science and behavioural data related to the on-going outbreak of Ebola in North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri provinces. Based on data gathered and analysed by organisations working in the Ebola response and in the region mor...e broadly, it explores convergences and divergences between datasets and, when possible, differences by geographic area, demographic group, time period and other relevant variables. Data sources are listed at the end of the document.
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Over 6 million people worldwide are infected with Trypanosoma cruzi, the protozoan that causes Chagas disease
(CD). T. cruzi is transmitted by triatomine insects, congenitally, through uncontrolled blood donations and organ transplants,
and via consumption of food or drink contaminated by triatomi...nes.
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DEVELOPMENT BULLETIN | No.74, June 2011 | Editor: Pamela Thomas | Features and case studies | Progress with implementing conventions and strategies | Progress with capacity building | Progress with disability-inclusive education | Disability-inclusive research | Innovative inclusion | Review of urba...nisation in the Pacific | Development assistance and disability
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Parasites & Vectors volume 15, Article number: 389 (2022)
Dengue is one of the common arboviral infections and is a public health problem in South East Asia. The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to evaluate the prevalence and distribution of dengue in SAARC (South Asian Associ...ation for Regional Cooperation) countries.
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This is the ninth paper in our series, “Community Health Workers at the Dawn of a New Era”. Community health workers (CHWs) are in an intermediary position between the health system and the community. While this position provides CHWs with a good platform to improve community health, a major cha...llenge in large-scale CHW programmes is the need for CHWs to establish and maintain benefcial relationships with both sets of actors, who may have diferent expectations and needs. This paper focuses on the quality of CHW relationships with actors at the local level of the national health system and with communities.
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This editorial will consider the often heralded and sometimes belittled Surgical Safety Checklist (SSCL) for its general benefits, potential utility, and range of evidence attesting to its value in quality and safety improvement.
People with mental disorders in low-income countries are at risk of being left behind during efforts to expand universal health coverage. Aim is to propose context-relevant strategies for moving towards universal health coverage for people with mental disorders in Ethiopia.
BMC Family Practice (2017) 18:56 DOI 10.1186/s12875-017-0628
Today there are Community-based Rehabilitation (CBR) programmes in a large number of countries. In many countries, the CBR approach is a part of the national rehabilitation services. However, there is a lack of reliable data about persons with disabilities who benefit from CBR and the kind of benefi...ts they receive. This article reviews the disability data collection systems and presents some case studies to understand the influence of operational factors on data collection in the CBR programmes. The review shows that most CBR programmes use a variable number of broad functional categories to collect information about persons with disabilities, combined occasionally with more specific diagnostic categories. This categorisation is influenced by local contexts and operational factors, including the limitations of human and material resources available for its implementation, making it difficult to have comparable CBR data. Therefore, any strategies to strengthen the data collection in CBR programmes must take these operational factors into account.
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BMJ Glob Health 2019;4:e001272. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2018-001272
Trust is an essential component of successful cooperative endeavours. The global health response to the 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak confronted historically tenuous regional relationships of trust. Challenging sociopolitical co...ntexts and initially inappropriate communication strategies impeded trustworthy relationships between communities and responders during the epidemic. Social scientists affiliated with the Ebola 100-Institut Pasteur project interviewed approximately 160 local, national and international responders holding a wide variety of roles during the epidemic
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