14 January 2021
This practical guide can be used to help countries monitor and analyse the impact of COVID-19 on essential health services to inform planning and decision-making. It provides practical recommendations on how to use key performance indicators to analyse changes in access to and deliv...ery of essential health services within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic; how to visualize and interpret these data; and how to use the findings to guide modifications for safe delivery of services and transitioning towards restoration and recovery. The guide focuses on existing indicators and data that are captured in routine reporting systems and how they can be used by national and subnational authorities to understand specific contexts, challenges and bottlenecks. This guide supports Maintaining essential health services: operational guidance for the COVID-19 context, which provides an integrated framework to guide countries in their efforts to reorganize, adapt and maintain safe delivery of high-priority essential health services within the context of the pandemic.
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Adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) remain disproportionately affected by HIV in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA), with 26 per cent of new infections attributed to this population. AGYW face many personal, social and structural barriers to access, uptake and use of traditional HIV prevention me...thods. Oral Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) is proven to be highly effective as an additional prevention choice for reducing the risk of HIV acquisition, including for AGYW. Successful uptake and adherence to PrEP is critical in its effectiveness as an HIV prevention method, however, the current demand for PrEP by AGYW is low with suboptimal adherence.
Within the ESA region, there is currently great impetus to address these challenges and scale up PrEP for AGYW. A critical aspect of this is to leverage the learnings and evidence from implementation of how to improve the demand and quality of PrEP programming for this population. Improving the Quality of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis Implementation for Adolescent Girls and Young Women in Eastern and Southern Africa examines the current efforts in the region to accelerate and scale up evidence-based PrEP delivery platforms. The implementation brief provides current knowledge and builds on WHO guidance to provide key considerations for implementation, including driving demand and improving quality, as well as focus on wider combination prevention and integration agendas.
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Service Availability and Readiness Assessment Tool
This new publication presents the continuing and emerging challenges to children’s environmental health.
To Initiating a Maternal, Neonatal and Child Health Project in Urban Slums with Social Mapping, Census Taking, and Community Engagement
he pandemic has produced an unprecedented economic and social crisis, and it could generate a food, humanitarian, and political crisis if urgent measures are not taken. The policy options for addressing the pandemic entail consolidating national plans and achieving intersectoral consensus. The respo...nse should be structured in three nonlinear and interrelated phases—control, reactivation, and rebuilding—involving the participation of technical actors representing not only the field of health but also other social and economic areas. Measures implemented to control the pandemic as well as measures for the reactivation and rebuilding phases will require increased public investment in health until the recommended parameters are achieved.
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A key purpose of the Recovery Toolkit is to support countries in the reactivation of health services which may have suffered as a result of the emergency. These services include ongoing programmes such as immunization and vaccinations, maternal and child health services, and noncommunicable diseases....
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Manual for Trainers and Programme Managers
While the world was gripped by the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, children continued to face the same crisis they have for decades: intolerably high mortality rates and vastly inequitable chances at life. In total, more than 5.0 million children under age 5, including 2.4 million newborns, alo...ng with 2.2 million children and youth aged 5 to 24 years – 43 per cent of whom are adolescents – died in 2020. This tragic and massive loss of life, most of which was due to preventable or treatable causes, is a stark reminder of the urgent need to end preventable deaths of children and young people.
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The Western Pacific Regional Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases (2014–2020) was developed in response to a resolution adopted at the sixty-second session of the WHO Regional Committee for the Western Pacific. The regional plan is fully harmonized with... the Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases (2013–2020) while adding the value of actions that build on regional achievements, contexts, opportunities and perspective
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