Technical Note
Recently, the approach to hazardous events has undergone a considerable shift, away from reactive activities focused on managing and responding to events and towards a more proactive process of emergency and disaster risk management ...(DRM). The ultimate goal of this shift in focus is to prevent new and reduce existing disaster risks, a process known as disaster risk reduction (DRR), while strengthening individual, community, societal and global resilience.
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To support countries in adapting their response to different COVID-19 scenarios, the World Health
Organization (WHO) Department of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent ...highlight medbox">Health and Ageing commissioned this scoping review of published and grey literature. The objective was to identify interventions implemented to maintain the provision and use of essential services for MNCAAH during disruptive events and to summarize lessons learned during these interventions. The review included outbreaks of Ebola virus disease (EVD), severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Zika virus disease (ZVD), the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and natural disasters and humanitarian emergencies that caused disruption to services, transport and other activities.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) is releasing the second edition of its Global Accelerated Action for the Health ...ight medbox">of Adolescents (AA-HA!) guidance. The document aims to equip governments to respond to the health and well-being challenges, opportunities and needs of adolescents.
The guidance provides the latest available data on adolescent health and well-being. It also outlines an updated list of core indicators that data should be collected on. Globally, road injury was the top cause of death for adolescent males in 2019. Among female adolescents, the leading causes of death were diarrhoeal diseases among the younger group (10-14 years) and tuberculosis (TB) in the older group (15-19 years).
Over the last 20 years, mortality rates have declined among adolescents globally, with the largest decline in older (15–19 years) adolescent girls. For non-fatal diseases, the burden has not improved over the past two decades, with the main causes of ill health in this category being: mental health conditions (depressive and anxiety disorders, childhood behavioural disorders), iron deficiency anaemia, skin diseases and migraine.
Adolescent well-being depends on a range of factors, including healthy food, education, life skills and employability, connectedness, feeling valued by society, safe and supportive environments, resilience, and the freedom to make choices. To take an appropriately holistic approach, the guidance outlines how to take crosscutting action to support adolescent health and well-being, with mutually reinforcing interventions across sectors, such as health, education, social protection, and telecommunications. Targeted efforts are also required to engage adolescents, as they trust health systems less than adults do and are especially vulnerable to modern-day trends, like online bullying and gaming.
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A major problem facing the world is how to build peace following the ravages of increasingly protracted armed conflict. Armed conflicts leave behind shattered, divided societies that are at risk of ...repeating cycles of violence, and therefore need concerted peacebuilding efforts. Conflicts also take a heavy toll on people’s mental health and psychosocial well-being. One in five people who live in a war zone will likely develop a mental disorder, and many others suffer from painful everyday stresses associated with multiple losses, family separation, gender-based violence (GBV), disability, climate change and ongoing insecurity, among other issues.
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Every day, schools engage in numerous activities that help promote the health and well-being of students, families, and communities. There is clear evidence ...x">of the benefits of the health-promoting schools (HPS) approach, not only for improving overall health outcomes (physical, mental, and social) in the educational community but also for achieving better learning outcomes. The closure of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted these benefits, as well as the close links between health, wellness, and education.
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Regional Network for Equity in Health in east and southern Africa (EQUINET): Disussion Paper 113
This report synthesises the learning across the full programme of work. It presents the method...s used, the context and policy motivations for developing EHBs; how they are being defined, costed, disseminated and used in health systems, including for service provision and quality, resourcing and purchasing services and monitoring and accountability on service delivery and performance, and for learning, useful practice and challenges faced.
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Helping Adolescents Thrive (HAT) is a joint WHO-UNICEF initiative to strengthen programming and policy responses for adolescents, to promote positive mental health, prevent ...-highlight medbox">mental health conditions,
and prevent self-harm and other risk behaviours. The vision of HAT is a world in which all adolescents, their caregivers, civil society and communities unite with governments to protect and promote adolescent mental health. This means taking action routinely to implement and monitor evidence-informed and human rights-based strategies for improving mental health, and to prevent and reduce mental health and substance use conditions in adolescents in order to improve lifelong well-being
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This module has been developed to provide training and guidance to improve the quality of care and human rights conditions in inpatient, outpatient and community based mental ...to-highlight medbox">health and related services, following the conduct of a comprehensive assessment using the WHO QualityRights assessment toolkit.
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This report explores community-focused change initiatives in the financing, organization, and delivery of mental health services in Peru from 2013 ...to 2016. It examines the national dimension of reforms but focuses above all on implementation and results in the economically fragile district of Carabayllo, in northern Lima.
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September – December 2021
The funds will be used by WHO to ensure:
continued coordination with other agencies and health actors in the response to the crisis situation
continuity of ...an class="attribute-to-highlight medbox">health services for the population of Afghanistan
provision of life-saving medical supplies
continued response to COVID-19
timely response to potential outbreaks
response to urgent trauma needs
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The framework sets out a response to current mental health challenges arising from the negative impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on population me...ntal health and well-being. The EFAMH provides a coherent basis for intensified efforts to mainstream, promote and safeguard mental well-being as an integral element of COVID-19 response and recovery; to counter the stigma and discrimination associated with mental health conditions;
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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 compl...exities 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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Although the COVID-19 crisis is, in the first instance, a physical health crisis, it has the seeds of a major mental ...light medbox">health crisis as well, if action is not taken. Good mental health is critical to the functioning of society at the best of times. It must be front and centre of every country’s response to and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. The mental health and wellbeing of whole societies have been severely impacted by this crisis and are a priority to be addressed urgently.
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Executive summary On 27th and 28th April 2021, the division of Disease Control and Prevention in collaboration with Public Health England, organized a virtual consultative meeting as part ...s="attribute-to-highlight medbox">of the consultations with Member States and partners for the development of the Africa CDC five years strategic plan for the prevention and control of Non-communicable Diseases … Report: Expert and stakeholder virtual consultation meeting to develop the Africa CDC Non-Communicable Diseases and Mental Health Strategy
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This training and guidance has been developed to provide an in-depth understanding on what it means to respect legal capacity in mental health and related areas as well as concrete strategies to ens...ure that people are able to exercise their right to legal capacity in all areas of their life. In this context a wide range of scenarios are used to describe how different models of supported decision making can be applied in practice.
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Petersen et al. Int J Ment Health Syst (2016) 10:30 DOI 10.1186/s13033-016-0060-z
Olashore et al.
Child Adolesc Psychiatry Ment Health (2017) 11:8 DOI 10.1186/s13034-017-0144-9
In African traditional medicine, the curative, training, promotive and rehabilitative services are referred to as clinical practices. These traditional health care services are provided through tradition and culture prescribed under a particular phi...losophy, e.g. ubuntu or unhu. Norms, taboos, tradition and culture, which are the cornerstones of clinical practice of traditional medicine, are the major reason for the acceptability of traditional health practitioners in the community they serve. The philosophical clinical care embedded in these traditions, culture and taboos have contributed to making traditional medicine practices acceptable and hence highly demanded by the population. This paper discusses the different traditional health care services, such as curative services, general traditional healthcare, mental healthcare, midwifery, bone setting, rehabilitative and promotional services that increases health awareness and developing
positive attitudes and behaviour towards healthier living).
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