Fact sheet
Good hygiene is critical to ensure that healthcare staff provide quality care, reduce the spread of infections, and protect the health of communities. This fact sheet explores the healthcare-related risks of poor hygiene and the critical elements of hand hygiene needed to improve qua...lity of care and reduce negative outcomes of poor compliance (e.g., healthcare-associated infections and antimicrobial resistance) in healthcare facilities, and provides recommendations and additional readings for improving hygiene in health settings and achieving a safe, clean healthcare environment.
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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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Technical guidance.
This technical guidance aims to inform policy and practice development specifically related to improving the health of older refugees and migrants within the European Union and the larger WHO European Region. Both ageing and migration are in themselves complex multidimensional p...rocesses shaped by a range of factors at the micro, meso and macro levels over the life-course of the individual, but also with intertwined trajectories. Relevant areas for policy-making include healthy ageing over the life-course, supportive environments, people-centred health and long-term care services, and strengthening the evidence base and research
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Comprehensive public health action on population ageing is urgently needed. This will require fundamental shifts, not just in the things we do, but in how we think about ageing itself. The World report on ageing and health outlines a framework for action to foster Healthy Ageing built around the new... concept of functional ability. Making these investments will have valuable social and economic returns, both in terms of health and wellbeing of older people and in enabling their on-going participation in society
Executive summaries : Arabic; Chinese; English; French; German; Japanese; Portuguese; Russian; Spanish
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The intended purpose of this compendium is to provide program managers, organizations, and policy makers with a menu of indicators to better “know their HIV epidemic/know their response” from a gender perspective. The indicators in the compendium are all either part of existing indicators used i...n studies or by countries or have been adapted from existing indicators to address the intersection of gender and HIV. The indicators can be measured through existing data collection and information systems (e.g. routine program monitoring, surveys) in most country contexts, though some may require special studies or research.
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A national overview with a case study from Tanahun district. The overall aims of this study are (1) to assess the extent to which social protection systems in Nepal address the needs of people with disabilities; and (2) to identify and document elements of good practice, as well as challenges, in th...e design and delivery of social protection for people with disabilities. As most social protection programmes in Nepal are targeted to various groups considered to be a high risk of poverty or marginalisation (e.g. orphans, widows), the research mainly focuses on disability-specific schemes, as they are relevant to a higher proportion of people with disabilities.
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Neonatal mortality is a major challenge in reducing child mortality rates in Nepal. Despite efforts by the Government of Nepal, data from the last three demographic and health surveys show a rise in the contribution of neonatal deaths to infant and child mortality. The Government of Nepal has implem...ented community-based programs that were piloted and then scaled up based on lessons learned. These programs include, but are not limited to ensuring safe motherhood, birth preparedness package, community-based newborn care package, and integrated management of childhood illnesses. Despite the implementation of such programs on a larger scale, their effective coverage is yet to be achieved. Health system challenges included an inadequate policy environment, funding gaps, inadequate procurement, and insufficient supplies of commodities, while human resource management has been found to be impeding service delivery. Such bottlenecks at policy, institutional and service delivery level need to be addressed incorporating health information in decision-making as well as working in partnership with communities to facilitate the utilization of available services.
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This technical brief presents the current options for safe storage and point of use water treatment. It is intended to help field staff working in a variety of locations to decide upon the most appropriate course of action for providing safe water for the communities in which they work. The effectiv...eness of household water treatment options now and in the future rely to a huge extent on user compliance; it is critical that users are involved in the decision making process, and are aware of the purpose, how to use, maintain and manage their household water options. The brief therefore details relevant hygiene promotion steps for the different treatment options.
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This document updates the 2014 Core Elements for Hospital Antibiotic Stewardship Programs and incorporates new evidence and lessons learned from experience with the Core Elements. The Core Elements are applicable in all hospitals, regardless of size. There are suggestions specific to small and criti...cal access hospitals in Implementation of Antibiotic Stewardship Core Elements at Small and Critical Access Hospitals (12).There is no single template for a program to optimize antibiotic prescribing in hospitals. Implementation of antibiotic stewardship programs requires flexibility due to the complexity of medical decision-making surrounding antibiotic use and the variability in the size and types of care among U.S. hospitals. In some sections, CDC has identified priorities for implementation, based on the experiences of successful stewardship programs and published data. The Core Elements are intended to be an adaptable framework that hospitals can use to guide efforts to improve antibiotic prescribing. The assessment tool that accompanies this document can help hospitals identify gaps to address.
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Global actions to reduce antimicrobial resistance (AMR) include optimising the use of antimicrobial medicines in human and animal health. In countries with weak healthcare regulation, this requires a greater understanding of the drivers of antibiotic use from the perspective of providers and consume...rs. In Bangladesh, there is limited research on household decision-making and healthcare seeking in relation to antibiotic use and consumption for humans and livestock. Knowledge is similarly lacking on factors influencing the supply and demand for antibiotics among qualified and unqualified healthcare providers. The aim of this study is to conduct integrated research on household decision-making for healthcare and antibiotic use, as well as the awareness, behaviours and priorities of healthcare providers and sellers of antibiotics to translate into policy development and implementation
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This second edition of the “living paper” contributes to the global knowledge on how countries are responding to the pandemic by documenting real-time actions in a key area of response – that is, social protection measures planned or implemented by governments.
For the purpose of this revie...w, we organized interventions by social assistance, social insurance and labor market programs. For the latter measures, we deliberately focused on supply-side programs (e.g., mostly wage subsidies and other activation programs). In most cases, data sources include official information published in government websites, while in many cases we reported information from global and national news outlets. In some cases, information was provided directly by country-based experts, while the full database was validated and integrated by regional and country social protection teams at the World Bank. Overall, findings should be considered preliminary and interpreted with caution.
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Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) represent a range of physical, mental, and behavioral disabilities caused by alcohol use during pregnancy, or prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE). FASDs are considered to be one of the leading preventable causes of developmental disability. Despite its high preval...ence, FASD is often misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed, making interventions more challenging or delayed.
his publication was initially developed for use in Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas and is intended to serve as a training workbook for providers of various disciplines to learn about the fundamentals of diagnosing FASD and to apply them to several case scenarios. It also discusses ethical implications of diagnosing FASD to the mother and child. Target audiences include physicians, psychologists, allied health professionals, social workers, and other providers that may encounter individuals affected by FASD. It is ideally used as a supplement for in-person training by experts in the fields of dysmorphology, epidemiology, and neuropsychology.
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interim Guidance 1 December 2020. Updated version
This document provides updated guidance on mask use in health care and community settings, and during home care for COVID-19 cases. It is intended for policy makers, public health and infection prevention and control professionals, health care manag...ers and health workers.
The Annex provides advice on how to manufacture non-medical masks. It is intended for those making non-medical masks at home and for mask manufacturers
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This document describes the ethical values that are most important to the nursing profession in Ontario. It also provides scenarios of ethical situations in which there is a conflict of values. Nurses are encouraged to use these scenarios for reflection and discussion. No solutions are offered becau...se there is no one solution that is best in all situations. The behavioural directives are intended to help nurses work through ethical situations and provide information about the College of Nurses of Ontario’s (CNO’s) expectations for ethical conduct. These are taken into account when CNO Committees assess nurses’ practices. Nurses need to consider behavioural directives carefully when making decisions about ethical care as this process will strengthen their practice.
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Bioethics - Medical, Ethical and Legal Perspectives
There’s evidence that implementing the four medical ethics principles may be challenging especially in low income country contexts with extreme resource scarcity and limited capacity to facilitate deliberations on the different ethical dilemmas.... These challenges can partly be explained by the social, economic, and political contexts in which the decisions are made, as well as the limited time, training and guidance to facilitate ethical decision making. Based on current literature, and using the example of bedside rationing; this chapter synthesizes the challenges clinicians face when operationalizing the four principle; identifying the opportunities to address them. We suggest that clinicians’ ability to implement the four principles are constrained by meso‐ and macro‐level decision making as well as their lack of training, explicit guidelines, and peer support. To ameliorate this situation, current efforts to strengthen the clinicians’ capacity to make ethical decisions should be complimented with developing of context relevant guidelines for ethical clinical decision making. The renewed global commitment to the sustainable development goals and universal healthcare coverage should be recognized as an opportunity to leverage resources and champion the integration of equity and justice as a core value in resource allocation at the bedside, meso-, macro- and global levels.
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These guidelines have been prepared by the Sub directorate: Maternal Health for the guidance of health workers (doctors and midwives) providing obstetric, surgical and anaesthetic services for pregnant women in district clinics, health centres and district hospitals. These guidelines are intended fo...r use in clinics, community health centres and district hospitals where specialist services are not normally available. The guidelines deal mainly with the diagnosis and especially the management of common and serious pregnancy problems. The assumption is made that the reader has a basic knowledge and understanding about the care of pregnant women. With a few exceptions (e.g. pre-eclampsia), there is no mention of aetiology and pathogenesis of the conditions described.https://www.knowledgehub.org.za/elibrary/guidelines-maternity-care-south-africa-2016
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BACKGROUND: Growing political attention to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) offers a rare opportunity for achieving meaningful action. Many governments have developed national AMR action plans, but most have not yet implemented policy interventions to reduce antimicrobial overuse. A systematic evidenc...e map can support governments in making evidence-informed decisions about implementing programs to reduce AMR, by identifying, describing, and assessing the full range of evaluated government policy options to reduce antimicrobial use in humans.
METHODS AND FINDINGS: Seven databases were searched from inception to January 28, 2019, (MEDLINE, CINAHL, EMBASE, PAIS Index, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Web of Science, and PubMed). We identified studies that (1) clearly described a government policy intervention aimed at reducing human antimicrobial use, and (2) applied a quantitative design to measure the impact. We found 69 unique evaluations of government policy interventions carried out across 4 of the 6 WHO regions. These evaluations included randomized controlled trials (n = 4), non-randomized controlled trials (n = 3), controlled before-and-after designs (n = 7), interrupted time series designs (n = 25), uncontrolled before-and-after designs (n = 18), descriptive designs (n = 10), and cohort designs (n = 2). From these we identified 17 unique policy options for governments to reduce the human use of antimicrobials. Many studies evaluated public awareness campaigns (n = 17) and antimicrobial guidelines (n = 13); however, others offered different policy options such as professional regulation, restricted reimbursement, pay for performance, and prescription requirements. Identifying these policies can inform the development of future policies and evaluations in different contexts and health systems. Limitations of our study include the possible omission of unpublished initiatives, and that policies not evaluated with respect to antimicrobial use have not been captured in this review.
CONCLUSIONS: To our knowledge this is the first study to provide policy makers with synthesized evidence on specific government policy interventions addressing AMR. In the future, governments should ensure that AMR policy interventions are evaluated using rigorous study designs and that study results are published.
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Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change pp 47–66
This chapter reviews the emerging importance of pollen allergies in relation to ongoing climate change. Allergic diseases have been increasing in prevalence over the last decades, partly as the result of the impact of climate change. ...Increased sensitisation rates and more severe symptoms have been the partial outcome of: increased pollen production of wind-pollinated plants resulting in long-term increased abundance of pollen in the air we breathe; earlier shifts of airborne pollen seasons making occurrence of allergic symptoms harder to predict and deal with efficiently; increased allergenicity of pollen causing more severe health effects in allergic individuals; introduction of new, invasive allergenic plant species causing new sensitisations; environment-environment interactions, such as plants and hosted microorganisms, i.e. fungi and bacteria, which comprise a complex and dynamic system, with additive, presently unforeseeable influences on human health; environment-human interactions, as the consequence of a combination of environmental factors, like air pollution, global warming, urbanisation and microclimatic variability, which create a multi-resolution spatiotemporal system that requires new processing technologies and huge data inflow in order to be thoroughly investigated. We suggest that novel, real-time, personalised pollen information services, like mobile-app risk alerts, must be developed to provide the optimum first line of allergy management.
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Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2018, 15(12), 2626; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15122626
Climate change is increasing risks to human health and to the health systems that seek to protect the safety and well-being of populations. Health authorities require information about current associatio...ns between health outcomes and weather or climate, vulnerable populations, projections of future risks and adaptation opportunities in order to reduce exposures, empower individuals to take needed protective actions and build climate-resilient health systems. An increasing number of health authorities from local to national levels seek this information by conducting climate change and health vulnerability and adaptation assessments. While assessments can provide valuable information to plan for climate change impacts, the results of many studies are not helping to build the global evidence-base of knowledge in this area. They are also often not integrated into adaptation decision making, sometimes because the health sector is not involved in climate change policy making processes at the national level. Significant barriers related to data accessibility, a limited number of climate and health models, uncertainty in climate projections, and a lack of funding and expertise, particularly in developing countries, challenge health authority efforts to conduct rigorous assessments and apply the findings. This paper examines the evolution of climate change and health vulnerability and adaptation assessments, including guidance developed for such projects, the number of assessments that have been conducted globally and implementation of the findings to support health adaptation action. Greater capacity building that facilitates assessments from local to national scales will support collaborative efforts to protect health from current climate hazards and future climate change. Health sector officials will benefit from additional resources and partnership opportunities to ensure that evidence about climate change impacts on health is effectively translated into needed actions to build health resilience.
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Female genital mutilation is a harmful traditional practice that violates girls’ right to health
and overall well-being. Most research cites social acceptance, marriageability, community
belonging, proof of virginity, curbing promiscuity, hygiene, and religion as motivations for the
practice. I...t is generally assumed that individual attitudes of parents and other family mem-
bers have an impact on decisions related to the cutting of girls, and that such attitudes are
influenced by social norms. The aim of this study is to understand how parental attitudes
towards the practice of female genital mutilation influence decision making related to the cut-
ting of girls.
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