The Guidelines on promotive and preventive mental health interventions for adolescents - Helping Adolescents thrive (HAT), provide evidence-informed recommendations on psychosocial interventions to promote mental health, prevent mental disorders, and reduce self-harm and other risk behaviours among ...adolescents.
The HAT Guidelines aims to inform policy development, service planning and the strengthening of health and education systems, and facilitate mainstreaming of adolescent mental health promotion and prevention strategies across sectors and delivery platforms.
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The health impact of radiological and nuclear emergencies can last for decades. Lessons learned from past radiological and nuclear accidents have demonstrated that the mental health and psychosocial consequences can outweigh the direct physical health impacts of radiation exposure. International rad...iation emergency preparedness and response standards outline provisions for mitigating these effects. Yet, practical guidance for addressing the mental health and psychosocial aspects of radiation emergencies remains scarce.
This framework aims to promote integration between the MHPSS and radiation protection fields. It is intended for officials and specialists involved in radiation emergency planning and risk management as well as MHPSS experts working in health emergencies.
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A new global Police Handbook aims to address some of the most difficult challenges that survivors of violence face when accessing police and justice sector services around the world.
The Quality Criteria for Health National Adaptation Plans (HNAPs) presents examples of good practice in HNAP development to assist countries in developing a comprehensive, feasible and implementable plan. The criteria are also intended to guide countries in setting the foundation for a long-term ite...rative HNAP process. The proposed criteria are not prescriptive and should be adapted to dynamic country contexts, uncertain and changing climatic conditions, and new knowledge and technologies.
9 February 2021
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The Minimum Standards and Indicators for Community Engagement were developed through an inter‑agency consultation process that engaged a large number of experts from around the world. UNICEF wishes to acknowledge the contribution of all those that participated, and who share a passion for placing ...communities at the centre of development and humanitarian action. The consultation process consisted of a series of interviews, meetings and workshops over an 18‑month period. Representatives from countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America contributed input and feedback based on their experiences of designing, implementing and measuring community engagement approaches
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The document is structured into five sections. The first presents the key experiences and challenges that justify a renewal of the EPHFs. The second section updates the groundwork for the exercise of public health and provides a framework to inform the exercise of the new essential functions. The th...ird section proposes a new integrated approach for implementing the EPHFs. The fourth section presents a new list of 11 EPHFs related to each stage of this integrated approach. Finally, in the last section, considerations are put forth to guide EPHF implementation as a means of strengthening the health sector.
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Member States have requested WHO policy guidance on how to facilitate the implementation of national AMS activities in an integrated and programmatic approach. This policy guidance responds to that demand from Member States and is anchored in public health guiding principles in the human health sect...or. It aims to provide a set of evidence-based and pragmatic recommendations to drive comprehensive and integrated AMS activities under the purview of a central national coordination unit, National AMR steering or coordinating committees or other equivalent national authorities.
Available in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese
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Infectious diseases cause over one billion human infections per year, with millions of deaths each year globally. Extensive health and financial burden is seen from both established and emerging infectious diseases. Infectious diseases also affect plants and animals, which may pose threats to agricu...lture and water supplies with additional impacts on human health. This Question and Answers, prepared by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Secretariat under their joint work programme on biodiversity and health, and launched of the occasion of the International Day for Biodiversity 2020, summarizes some of the interlinkages between biodiversity and infectious diseases.
WHO is continuously monitoring and responding to the COVID 19 outbreak. This Q&A will be updated as more is known about COVID-19, how it is affecting people worldwide, and the effectiveness of interventions against the disease.
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High prices, hard-to-access human insulin, few insulin producers, and weak health systems are just some of the barriers that people with diabetes face a century after insulin was discovered, WHO notes in a new report
t aims to enable participants to:
know more about children’s reactions to distress
know what psychological first aid for children is and what it is not
understand the three action principles of ‘Look, Listen and Link’ in relation to children
have practised providing PFA t...o a child and caregiver in distress
have considered complex reactions and situations
be aware of the importance of self-care when helping others.
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This report summarizes the latest scientific knowledge on the links between exposure to air pollution and adverse health effects in children. It is intended to inform and motivate individual and collective action by health care professionals to prevent damage to children’s health from exposure to ...air pollution.
Air pollution is a major environmental health threat. Exposure to fine particles in both the ambient environment and in the household causes about seven million premature deaths each year. Ambient air pollution alone imposes enormous costs on the global economy, amounting to more than US$ 5 trillion in total welfare losses in 2013.
This public health crisis is receiving more attention, but one critical aspect is often overlooked: how air pollution affects children in uniquely damaging ways. Recent data released by the World Health Organization (WHO) show that air pollution has a vast and terrible impact on child health and survival. Globally, 93% of all children live in environments with air pollution levels above the WHO guidelines (see the full report, Air pollution and child health: prescribing clean air. More than one in every four deaths of children under 5 years of age is directly or indirectly related to environmental risks. Both ambient air pollution and household air pollution contribute to respiratory tract infections that resulted in 543 000 deaths in children under the age of 5 years in 2016.
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The biosphere underlies the whole sustainable development concept, as the layer on
which society and the economy rely. Nature and biodiversity fuel the natural cycles
and life-support systems of the planet, on which humanity ultimately depends.
The Planetary Health Education Framework is a project of the Planetary Health Alliance (planetaryhealthalliance.org). The Planetary Health Alliance is a consortium of over 250 partners from around the world committed to understanding and addressing the human health impacts of global environmental ch...ange
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Over the ages, human societies have altered local ecosystems and modified regional climates. Today the human influence has attained a global scale. This reflects the recent rapid increase in population size, energy consumption, intensity of land use, international trade and travel, and other human a...ctivities. These global changes have heightened awareness that the long-term good health of populations depends on the continued stability of biosphere's ecological, physical and socioeconomic systems.
The world's climate system is an integral part of the complex of life-supporting processes. Like other large systems, the global climate system is coming under pressure from human activities.
This book seeks to describe the context and process of global climate change, its actual or likely impacts on health, and how human societies and their governments should respond with particular focus on the health sector.
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Climate change is already having severe impacts across our planet, bringing new and previously unimaginable challenges to the people least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions.
This report, the first we’ve released jointly in the history of our organizations, provides a sobering review of h...ow just one of those challenges – the increase in deadly heat-waves – threatens to drive new emergency needs in the not-so-distant future.
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The domestic regulation of public health emergencies (PHEs) is inextricably linked to the regulation of other types of disaster. PHEs are usually governed at least partly by general disaster and emergency laws. Moreover, there is significant overlap in the legal mechanisms used to respond to PHEs an...d other types of disaster, including the declaration of a state of disaster or emergency and the use of emergency powers. Even where PHEs are regulated by separate instruments, those instruments must surmount many of the same policy and practical challenges as general disaster laws, such as finely balancing competing considerations (e.g. speedy response versus due process), facilitating the coordination of a multitude of actors, and protecting the most vulnerable within society. Finally, many contemporary developments in disaster risk management (DRM), such as a greater emphasis on risk reduction and preparedness, are just as pertinent to PHEs as to other types of disaster.
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PLoS Negl Trop Dis 16(10): e0009774. Although the practice of communication is often called upon when intervening asn involgvingcommunties affected by NTD's, the disciplinary framewokr of healt communication research has been largely absent from NTD strategies. To illustrate how practices conceptual...ized and developed within the communication field habe been applied in the context of NTD elimination, we conducted a scoping review focusing on two diseases currently targeted for elimination by the WHO: lymphatic filariasis and Chagas disease
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The longlist of knowledge gaps is based on existing research agendas published in 2015 or later and expert input from reviewers of the first draft of the longlist. It only includes knowledge gaps focussing on a better
understanding of the relationship between global environmental change and human h...ealth, and finding an answer to the question of how best to protect human health against these new threats.
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