This document aims to assist policy‑makers, health care providers and researchers to understand key concepts in health ethics and to identify basic ethical questions surrounding health and health care. It illustrates the challenges of applying ethical principles to global public health and outline...s practical strategies for dealing with those challenges.
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Outstanding child and adolescent TB priorities include the need to: find the missing children with active TB and link them to TB care; prevent TB in children who are in contact with infectious TB cases (through implementation of active contact investigation and provision of preventive treatment); an...d advance integration within general child health services, including maternal and child health/ reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health, HIV, nutrition and other programmes.
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The greatest risk to persons engaging in international medical emergency response is poor preparation.
The In Control handbook hopes to provide a remedy.
At the time of writing, we are living through the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, a health emergency that disregards physical borders, brin...gs into focus social inequalities and affects people on every continent. This shared challenge requires unprecedented measures and the collaboration of the brightest minds to support global health protection through this crisis and beyond. Healthcare infrastructures have to be strengthened, public health capacities and processes upgraded, medical countermeasures and vaccinations found and psychosocial side-effects treated.
Solidarity is the normative order of the day and the human species has to collaborate to face this invisible threat. Hiding and living in fear is not an option in this interconnected world. We have both a responsibility and an opportunity to make substantial contributions to a safer, healthier and more sustainable future for us all.
The existence of this handbook is an impressive example of solidarity. Over 50 authors from more than 15 institutes and organisations have come together voluntarily within a very short time to make their expertise available and enable cross-sectoral thinking. Knowledge is bundled, resources are combined, information gaps are filled. The In Control handbook is not a theoretical treatise of possible dangers, but a collection of subject-matter expertise, written by experts and practitioners who have shaped health topics over the past 20 years in the most diverse corners of the world.
The Centre for International Health Protection at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) is collaborating with its partners and investing heavily in the build-up of operational know-how and capacity to support health crisis response abroad. This is done by preparing and enabling professionals to deploy safely across the world to assist those in need. In Control addresses the multi-faceted challenges of an international deployment. Readers will find not only technical medical information, but also insights into, for example, the fragility of our environment, the cultural differences that influence risk communication or the dilemmas arising from social distancing. Legal principles are highlighted, along with ethical guidance to ensure that our actions and decisions correspond to the highest moral standards.
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Poor quality health services are holding back progress on improving health in countries at all income levels.
Today, inaccurate diagnosis, medication errors, inappropriate or unnecessary treatment, inadequate or unsafe clinical facilities or practices, or providers who lack adequate training an...d expertise prevail in all countries.
The situation is worst in low and middle-income countries where 10 percent of hospitalized patients can expect to acquire an infection during their stay, as compared to seven percent in high income countries. This is despite hospital acquired infections being easily avoided through better hygiene, improved infection control practices and appropriate use of antimicrobials.. At the same time, one in ten patients is harmed during medical treatment in high income countries.
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This companion to the ALNAP EHA Guide offers protection-specific insights for evaluators and evaluation commissioners across the humanitarian sector. It covers the planning, data management and analysis phases of evaluation and addresses a range of challenges that – whilst not all unique to protec...tion – are often exacerbated by the contexts in which protection activities typically take place. Challenges addressed include those arising from the multi-faceted nature of protection activities, the difficulty understanding cause-effect relationships underlying protection risks, and the challenges of accessing and managing very sensitive data, sometimes drawn from communities in conflict.
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By December of 2019, an estimated 5.3 million Venezuelans would have left the country, migrating in search of opportunities, health services and an overall search to improve the socio-economic conditions of themselves and their families. This is the largest migration in the history of the Americas. ...Migrants are one of the most vulnerable populations, exposed to human trafficking, abuse, exploitation and violence.
This Emergency Appeal seeks funds to reach this vulnerable population through a range of services that are aimed at preserving the dignity of migrant populations and increasing their wellbeing. These services are: shelter; livelihoods and basic needs; health services; water, sanitation and hygiene services; protection gender and inclusion. T
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The regional Migrant Response Plan (MRP) for the Horn of Africa and Yemen includes urgent life-saving humanitarian and protection interventions to improve safe and dignified access to basic services for migrants and host communities while ensuring medium- to long-term actions aimed at addressing the... drivers of migration.
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Religion and Development 01/2019. Discussion Paper Series of the Research Programme on Religious Communities and Sustainable Development
This paper explores access to water, sanitation, and health in pastoral communities in northern Tanzania. It argues that the concept of gender, used on its own, is not enough to understand the complexities of sanitation, hygiene, water, and health. It explores pastoralists’ views and perspectives ...on what is ‘clean’, ‘safe’, and ‘healthy’, and their need to access water and create sanitary arrangements that work for them, given the absence of state provision of modern water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure. Although Tanzania is committed to enhancing its citizens’ access to WASH services, pastoral sanitation and hygiene tend to be overlooked and little attention is paid to complex ways in which access to ‘clean’ water and ‘adequate sanitation’ is structured in these communities. This paper offers an intersectional analysis of water and sanitation needs, showing how structural discrimination in the form of a lack of appropriate infrastructure, a range of sociocultural norms and values, and individual stratifiers interact to influence the sanitation and health needs of pastoralist men, women, boys, and girls.
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The WHO Global Tuberculosis Report 2022 provides a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the TB epidemic, and of progress in prevention, diagnosis and treatment of the disease, at global, regional and country levels. This is done in the context of global TB commitments, strategies and targets.
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The 2022 edition of the report is as usual, based primarily on data gathered by WHO from national ministries of health in annual rounds of data collection. In 2022, 202 countries and territories with more than 99% of the world’s population and TB cases reported data
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This report presents key findings from a study carried out on ‘Assessing the effectiveness of targeting mechanisms under PMJAY’. It provides a detailed analysis of potential inclusion and exclusion errors in two select states in India (Haryana and Uttarakhand) to inform National Health Authority...’s (NHA) policy
and approach around beneficiary targeting.
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This working paper is a case study on South Sudan as an important refugee country of origin. The case study looks at issues of forced displacement in South Sudan and underscores the linkages between internally displaced persons and South Sudanese refugees. The case study highlights the importance of... understanding local contexts and root drivers of conflict and displacement. It reviews evaluations of programmes in South Sudan, including past efforts at state building and refugee resettlement to look at learning within the international community. The study was undertaken as part of a wider research project on learning from evaluations to improve responses to situations of forced displacement .
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Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV‑2) causing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has reached pandemic levels;
Patients with cardiovascular (CV) risk factors and established cardiovascular disease (CVD) represent a vulnerable population when suffering from COVID-19;
Patien...ts with cardiac injury in the context of COVID-19 have an increased risk of morbidity and mortality
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Since the Alma Ata Declaration in 1978, community health volunteers (CHVs) have been at the forefront, providing health services, especially to underserved communities, in low-income countries. However, consolidation of CHVs position within formal health systems has proved to be complex and continue...s to challenge countries, as they devise strategies to strengthen primary healthcare. Malawi’s community health strategy, launched in 2017, is a novel attempt to harmonise the multiple health
service structures at the community level and strengthen service delivery through a team-based approach. The core community health team (CHT) consists of health surveillance assistants (HSAs), clinicians, environmental health officers and CHVs. This paper reviews Malawi’s strategy, with particular focus on the interface between HSAs, volunteers in community-based programmes and
the community health team. Our analysis identified key challenges that may impede the strategy’s implementation:
(1) inadequate training, imbalance of skill sets within CHTs and unclear job descriptions for CHVs; (2) proposed community-level interventions require expansion of pre-existing roles for most CHT members; and (3) district authorities may face challenges meeting financial obligations and filling community-level positions. For effective implementation, attention and further deliberation is needed on the appropriate forms of CHV support, CHT composition with possibilities of co-opting trained CHVs
from existing volunteer programmes into CHTs, review of CHT competencies and workload, strengthening coordination and communication across all community actors, and financing mechanisms. Policy support through the development of an addendum to the strategy, outlining opportunities for task-shifting between CHT members, CHVs’ expected duties and interactions with paid CHT personnel is recommended.
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