Open access book describing tools for engaging communities in resilience strategies
Based on practical experience from participatory positive futures visioning in nine Latin American and US cit
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ies
For students and professionals of different sectors including sustainability, engineering, ecology and urban planning
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UNICEF Annual Report 2017 - Burkina Faso
- Healthcare policy for children
- Food insecurity
- Community health strategy
- National child protection system
etc.
Update of the Mental Health Gap Action Programme
(mhGAP) Guideline for Mental, Neurological and Substance use Disorders May 2015
A toolkit for pharmacists.
Emerging data show that medication errors and adverse events cause significant harm to patients’ health and
well-being. It is estimated that the burden of adverse even
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ts due to medicines is now comparable to that of
widespread diseases, such as malaria or tuberculosis.1 The impacts of medication errors also represent a
burden for health systems, with the annual cost associated with medication errors estimated at USD 42 billion
worldwideharm
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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
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reduce antimicrobial overuse. A systematic evidence 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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The Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) Guidelines aim to support healthcare workers improve quality and safety health care. The Guidelines further aim to promote and facilitate the overall goal of IPC by providing evidence-based recommendations
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on the critical aspects of IPC, focusing on the fundamental principles and priority action areas. All health service organizations should consider the risk of healthcare-associated infection(s) (HAI) and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) transmission to implement these recommendations. The IPC Guidelines also set national standards for the prevention and control of HAIs and to ensure compliance to the National Quality Standards.
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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 p
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lants and animals, which may pose threats to agriculture 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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The report and an accompanying series of studies show the global uptake of the World Health Organization (WHO) Surgical Safety Checklist in its first ten years since its launch and recommend ways the Checklist can be more effectively used to improve
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surgical safety for millions at risk.
The report found that uptake has been remarkably positive: the Checklist has been adopted in almost 90% of operating rooms in countries with a high Human Development Index (HDI), a country-level measure of health, education, and standard of living. It was referenced by at least 139 (70%) of the world's countries and is included as a national standard by the health ministries of at least 20 countries. The Checklist has also had beneficial qualitative impact, introducing a culture of safety and improved communication within surgical teams, increasing patient trust, and improving job satisfaction.
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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, par
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tly 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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BMJ Glob Health 2019;4:e001272. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2018-001272
Trust is an essential component of successful cooperative endeavours. The global health response to the 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola o
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utbreak confronted historically tenuous regional relationships of trust. Challenging sociopolitical contexts and initially inappropriate communication strategies impeded trustworthy relationships between communities and responders during the epidemic. Social scientists affiliated with the Ebola 100-Institut Pasteur project interviewed approximately 160 local, national and international responders holding a wide variety of roles during the epidemic
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The report studied child poverty in nine dimensions – development/stunting, nutrition, health, water, sanitation, and housing. Other dimensions included education, health related knowledge, and in
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formation and participation.
An estimated 36 million of a total population of 41 million children under the age of 18 in Ethiopia are multi-dimensionally poor, meaning they are deprived of basic goods and services in at least three dimensions
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A Situational Assessment and Five-YearAction Plan for the Africa CDC Strengthening Regional Public Health Institutions and Capacity for Surveillanc
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e and Response Program
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Gender-based violence is a life-threatening, global health and human rights issue that violates international human rights law and principles of gender equality. It is also a threat to lasting peace and an affront to our common humanity. United Nati
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ons Member States have called for urgent action to end GBV in emergencies, recognizing that in crises, the risk of GBV is heightened, particularly for women and adolescent girls.
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This document lays out economic arguments for investing in the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-Accelerator). Framed within an overall context that recognizes the broader human health and s
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ocietal impacts of the COVID-19 crisis, ACT-Accelerator's Economic Investment Case argues that investment in ACT-Accelerator is the world’s best bet and most viable solution for restarting the global economy. It is intended for governments, multilaterals, civil society, businesses and foundations and all those interested in the work required to change the course of the pandemic. The global deployment of ACT-Accelerator’s comprehensive package of tools will reduce the severity of COVID-19 disease, enabling countries to transition out of the crisis thereby restarting domestic and international economic engines driving our global economy.
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PlosOne https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0161576; Zoonotic diseases have varying public health burden and socio-economic impact across time and geographical settings making their prioritization for
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prevention and control important at the national level. We conducted systematic prioritization of zoonotic diseases and developed a ranked list of these diseases that would guide allocation of resources to enhance their surveillance, prevention, and control.
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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 crit
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ical elements of hand hygiene needed to improve quality 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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MSF provides treatment for HIV and tuberculosis (TB) in more than 20 countries around the world. The report Burden sharing or burden shifting? How the HIV/TB response is being derailed examines the situation in nine countries where MSF runs program
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mes: Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eswatini, Guinea, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Myanmar and Zimbabwe. With a focus on the financial resources available, this report highlights the current risks and gaps in HIV and TB service delivery in these countries.
Given the findings of gaps in diagnosis, prevention and care services and dwindling resources, MSF calls for a robust assessment of the needs and the resource capacity of each affected country, and calls on international donors to ensure that the financial burden is shared, rather than shifted onto those countries worst affected by the diseases.
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Using Epidemiology to Support Primary Health Care. Updated version of the WHO handbook published in the early 1990's entitled: Manual of Epidemiology for District
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Health Management or those with an interest in applied epidemiology in primary health care and district health systems
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Produced by Training and Research Support Centre for the Regional Network for Equity in Health in east and southern Africa (EQUINET), March 20, 202
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0.
This brief summarises and provides links to official, scientific and other resources to support an understanding of and individual to regional level responses to the epidemic of ‘novel coronavirus’, also known as COVID-19.
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The pandemic presents tough choices for governments, local communities, health and school systems, as well as families and businesses: How to re-open safely? How to safeguard people’s lives and pr
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otect their livelihoods? Where to allocate scarce resources? How to protect those unable to protect themselves? Answers to questions like these will affect our short-term success in battling the spread of the virus and could have impacts for generations to come.
More than ever, the world needs reliable and trustworthy data and statistics to inform these important decisions. The United Nations and all member organizations of the Committee for the Coordination of Statistical Activities (CCSA) collect and make available a wealth of information for assessing the multifaceted impacts of the pandemic. This report updates some of the global and regional trends presented in Volume I and offers a snapshot of how COVID-19 continues to affect the world today across multiple domains.
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