This handbook builds on lessons learned from surveys implemented 2015-2017 and advice provided by the Global task force on TB patient cost surveys. It provides a standardized methodology for conducting health facility-based cross-sectional surveys to assess the direct and indirect costs incurred by ...TB patients and their households. In addition, it provides recommendations on results dissemination, engaging across sectors in policy dialogue and enabling action and related research for effective modifications in care delivery models, in patient support, and wider cross-sectoral interventions.
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Climate change (CC) impacts on health outcomes, both direct and indirect, are sufficient to jeopardize achieving the World Bank Group’s visions and agendas in poverty reduction, population resilience, and health, nutrition and population (HNP). In the last 5 years, the number of voices calling for... stronger international action on climate change and health has increased, as have the scale and depth of activities. But current global efforts in climate and health are inadequately integrated. As a result, actions to address climate change, including World Bank Group (WBG) investment and lending, are missing opportunities to simultaneously promote better health outcomes and more resilient populations and health sectors. Accordingly, with the financial support of the Nordic Development Fund (NDF), the World Bank Group set out to develop an approach and a 4-year action plan, outlined in this paper, to integrate health-related climate considerations into selected WBG sector plans and investments.
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Int J Bipolar Disord (2018) 6:6 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40345‑017‑0110‑8
In 2001, the WHO stated that: "The use of mobile and wireless technologies to support the achievement of health objectives (mHealth) has the potential to transform the face of health service delivery across the globe".... Within mental health, interventions and monitoring systems for depression, anxiety, substance abuse, eating disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have been developed and used. The present paper presents the status and findings from studies using automatically generated objective smartphone data in the monitoring of bipolar disorder, and addresses considerations on the current literature and methodological as well as clinical aspects to consider in the future studies.
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Music therapy can help traumatized children and adults to stabilize and to create a safe space for the expression of feelings and thoughts. In a 1 day international symposium on Friday May 26, presenting lectures and workshops, we’ll highlight the way music therapy research, methods and technique...s are applied to treating childhood trauma and sexual abuse, traumatized refugees, prisoners and victims of violence.
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Version 1.1. The WHO protocol has been adapted to resource-limited settings and builds on existing methodologies from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the Global PPS project from University of Antwerp, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Med...icines Utilisation Research in Africa (MURIA).
Point Prevalence Surveys collects information on prescribing practices of antibiotics and other information relevant to treatment and management of infectious diseases in hospitalized patients, and complements surveillance of antimicrobial consumption.
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Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease 2017, 2(4), 50
This is a cross-sectional analysis of baseline data in a longitudinal study on asymptomatic, LF antigen-positive and -negative young people in Myanmar. Rapid field screening was used to identify antigen-positive cases and a group of antige...n-negative controls of similar age and gender were invited to continue in the study. ... Results demonstrate that sub-clinical changes associated with infection can be detected in asymptomatic cases. Further exploration of these low-cost devices in clinical and research settings on filariasis-related lymphedema are warranted.
https://doi.org/10.3390/tropicalmed2040050
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The goal of this Global Action Plan is to articulate synergistic actions that will be required to prevent HIVDR from undermining efforts to achieve global targets on health and HIV, and to provide the most effective treatment to all people living with HIV including adults, key populations, pregnant ...and breastfeeding women, children and adolescents. The Global Action Plan has five strategic objectives: 1) prevention and response; 2) monitoring and surveillance; 3) research and innovation; 4) laboratory capacity; and 5) governance and enabling mechanisms.
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Good primary care may lead to fewer avoidable hospitalizations, but unsafe primary care can cause avoidable illness and injury, leading to unnecessary hospitalizations, and in some cases, disability and even death.Implementing system changes and practices are crucial to improve safety at all levels ...of health care. Recognizing the paucity of accessible information on primary care, World Health Organization (WHO) set up a Safer Primary Care Expert Working Group. The Working Group reviewed the literature, prioritized areas in need of further research and compiled a set of nine monographs which cover selected priority technical topics. WHO is publishing this technical series to make the work of these distinguished experts available to everyone with an interest in Safer Primary Care.The aim of this technical series is to provide a compendium of information on key issues that can impact safety in the provision of primary health care.
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The new WHO Guidelines on Sanitation and Health summarize the evidence on the effectiveness of a range of sanitation interventions and provide a comprehensive framework for health-protecting sanitation, covering policy and governance measures, implementation of sanitation technologies, systems and b...ehavioural interventions, risk-based management, and monitoring approaches. Critically, the guidelines articulate the role of the health sector in maximizing the health impact of sanitation interventions.
The guidelines also identify gaps in the evidence-base to guide future research efforts to improve the effectiveness of sanitation interventions.
(French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic in production)
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This brief focuses specifically on the Grand Nord (Great North): the Beni and Lubero territories of northern North Kivu that are the epicentre of the outbreak. Further participatory enquiry should be undertaken with the affected populations, but given ongoing transmission, conveying key consideratio...ns and immediate recommendations have been prioritised.
This brief is based on a rapid review of existing published and grey literature, professional ethnographic research in DRC, personal communication with administrative and health officials and practitioners in the country, and experience of previous Ebola outbreaks.
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Each year, about 210 million women become pregnant and about 140 million newborn babies are delivered. The sheer scale of maternal health issues makes maternal well being and survival vital concerns. A decade after The Lancet published a Series on maternal survival, a new Series of six papers brings... our knowledge of maternal health, its epidemiology, successes, and current failings together, and at a crucial time within the sustainable development framework to 2030. The Series concludes with a call to action setting out five key targets which need to be met to ensure the progression of broader sustainable development goals (SDGs).
Open Access
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This National Action Plan addresses actions needed to be taken in order to combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the country. It is obligatory to raise awareness of antimicrobial resistance and promote behavioral change through public communication
programmes that targets human, animal and plant... health. Inclusion of the use of antimicrobial agents and resistance in school curricula will further promote better understanding and awareness from an early age. Antimicrobial Resistance knowledge, surveillance and research will be strengthened through establishing a national surveillance system for antimicrobial resistance, establishing and building capacity for a national reference laboratory and designated laboratories for AMR surveillance, developing a national research agenda on AMR and establishing and supporting a coordinated mechanism that will ensure harmonized AMR guidelines, data management and sharing systems in human, animal and plant health settings.
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Myanmar, as a country going through rapid socio-political transition and institutional development also suffers with a high burden of infectious disease. An ongoing challenge has been to effectively reach its 51 million population, most of whom battle tuberculosis, acute respiratory infections, diar...rhoea and malaria including amongst under-five children.
Limited research data on the occurrence of resistant organisms in the nation have, makes it hard to estimate the exact antimicrobial resistance (AMR) scenario. Limited peer reviewed evidence indicates significant divergence from the average resistance trends in APAC region. Nevertheless, several key steps by Government of Myanmar have been instrumental in paving the way for the country to join other nations in the South East Asia Region to speed up its plan on addressing the AMR crisis. Combating antimicrobial resistance would, however, require highest political commitment, multi-sectoral coordination, sustained investment and technical assistance.
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This policy brief has been developed in response to the contemporary challenge of antibiotic resistance (ABR). ABR poses a formidable threat to global health and sustainable development. It is now increasingly recognized that the systematic neglect of cultural factors is one of the biggest obs...tacles to achieving better health outcomes and better standards of living worldwide. Using a cultural contexts of health approach, the policy brief explores the centrality of culture to the challenge of ABR. The brief examines how the prescription and use of antibacterial medicines, the transmission of resistance, and the regulation and funding of research are influenced by cultural, social and commercial, as well as biological and technological factors. The brief moves beyond the ready equation of culture with individual behaviours and demonstrates how culture serve as an enabler of health and provide new possibilities for change.
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Everyday experience shows that there is a commonality between spirituality and medical practice. A text message I received from a friend recently read, "Please pray for me. I've been getting a mysterious headache for some days now. I will be seeing the doctor today." This clearly speaks of a relatio...nship: asking for prayer so as to be relieved of a "mysterious headache", yet going to see a doctor whose job is not to cure mysterious headaches. Even though both areas of human experience have their peculiar and largely unrelated methodologies, this paper argues that any extreme separation of the two is injurious to the teleology of both disciplines in relation to human well-being, which forms the core of spirituality and medicine.
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The Catholic Church maintains that the Imago Dei is the ground for human dignity. The secular world, too, endorses human dignity as the foundation for human rights without referring to Imago Dei. The Catholic Church and the secular world both agree on the importance of human dignity, ev...en though they differ on their views about the source of human dignity. In this paper, we shall examine if human dignity can be the basis of a fruitful dialogue between the Catholic Church and the secular world in order to make our world a better place to live. The primary resources for our study are the Church documents on human dignity, and the opinions of distinguished thinkers on the need to promote a culture of dialogue between religions and secular world.
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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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Because of the limited access to more powerful diagnostic tools, there is a paucity of data regarding the burden of fungal infections in Burkina Faso. The aim of this study was to estimate the incidence and prevalence of serious fungal infections in this sub-Saharan country. We primarily used the na...tional demographic data and performed a PubMed search to retrieve all published papers on fungal infections from Burkina Faso and its surrounding West African countries. Considering the prevalence of HIV infection (0.8% of the population) and a 3.4% incidence of cryptococcosis in hospitals, it is estimated that 459 patients per year develop cryptococcosis. For pneumocystosis, it is suggested that 1013 new cases occur every year. Taking into account the local TB frequency (population prevalence at 0.052%), we estimate the prevalence of chronic pulmonary aspergillosis at 1120 cases. Severe forms of asthma with fungal sensitization and allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis are estimated to affect 7429 and 5628 cases, respectively. Vulvovaginal candidiasis may affect 179,000 women, and almost 1,000,000 children may suffer from tinea capitis. Globally, we estimate that roughly 1.4 million people in Burkina Faso (7.51% of the population) suffer from a serious fungal infection. These data should be used to drive future epidemiological studies, diagnostic approaches, and therapeutic strategies.
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Supportive supervision is considered critical to community health worker programme performance, but there is relatively little understanding of how it can be sustainably done at scale. Supportive supervision is a holistic concept that encompasses three key functions: management (ensuring performance...), education (promoting development) and support (responding to needs and problems). Drawing on the experiences of the ward-based outreach team (WBOT) strategy, South Africa’s national community health worker (CHW) programme, this paper explores and describes approaches to supportive supervision in policy and programme guidelines and how these are implemented in supervision practices in the North West Province, an early adopter of the WBOT strategy. Outreach teams typically consist of six CHWs plus a nurse outreach team leader (OTL).
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Environment International Volume 86, January 2016, Pages 14-23
Climate change refers to long-term shifts in weather conditions and patterns of extreme weather events. It may lead to changes in health threat to human beings, multiplying existing health problems. This review examines the scientific e...vidences on the impact of climate change on human infectious diseases. It identifies research progress and gaps on how human society may respond to, adapt to, and prepare for the related changes. Based on a survey of related publications between 1990 and 2015, the terms used for literature selection reflect three aspects — the components of infectious diseases, climate variables, and selected infectious diseases. Humans' vulnerability to the potential health impacts by climate change is evident in literature. As an active agent, human beings may control the related health effects that may be effectively controlled through adopting proactive measures, including better understanding of the climate change patterns and of the compound disease-specific health effects, and effective allocation of technologies and resources to promote healthy lifestyles and public awareness. The following adaptation measures are recommended: 1) to go beyond empirical observations of the association between climate change and infectious diseases and develop more scientific explanations, 2) to improve the prediction of spatial–temporal process of climate change and the associated shifts in infectious diseases at various spatial and temporal scales, and 3) to establish locally effective early warning systems for the health effects of predicated climate change.
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