18 Janaury 2021
EU/EEA Member States and the UK have increased their laboratory capacity tremendously over the past 11 months as the majority of the Member States reported sufficient testing capacity until March 2021.
Many countries are ad...ding rapid antigen detection tests (RADT) to their testing strategies in order to reduce pressure on RT-PCR testing.
Some Member States have already included RADT in their case definition.
The main bottlenecks, such as shortages of laboratory consumables and human resources, as well as sample storing facilities, continue to exist and may affect the overall laboratory response to COVID-19.
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Mental health problems are common and cause great suffering to individuals and communities around the world. They have a significant impact not only on the physical ...ht medbox">and mental health of those affected but also on their families and the communities they live in. At the same time, all communities have their own traditional mechanisms for support and contain a range wide of resources that can be helpful in preventing mental health conditions from developing, promoting positive mental health and supporting the recovery of people that are struggling with a mental health condition.
In the wider context, people living with a mental health condition are often excluded from their communities and experience various violations to their basic human rights (discrimination, violence, exclusion from employment opportunities). The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the mean prevalence of global mental health disorders is 10.8% while the prevalence in emergency settings is 22.1% in any conflict-affected population.
During emergencies and crisis, the stigma, exclusion and discrimination towards people living with mental health conditions is often higher, which can cause isolation and protection issues. Communities can play a crucial role in promoting mental health as well as enhancing primary care and access. Their role is to help reduce mental health inequalities by providing community resources that connect people to community-based resources and by providing mental health education. This also helps to reduce the massive mental health treatment gap.
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This discussion guide is designed to assist individuals and
agencies working toward developing trauma-informed
approaches to service delivery. It describes how common
traumatic experiences are for individuals accessing health
...ute-to-highlight medbox">and social services, and it provides information to help service
providers recognize the adaptations people make to cope with
trauma. Trauma awareness is a foundation for developing
trauma-informed services, which integrate knowledge about
trauma into policies, procedures, and practices. Traumainformed
services actively seek to avoid re-traumatization and
have been shown to improve client engagement, retention, and
outcomes. This guide includes practice examples, suggested
resources, and sample questions to stimulate further discussion.
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Cognitive deficits in schizophrenia can massively impact functionality and quality of life, furthering the importance of cognitive training. Despite the development of the field in Europe ...s="attribute-to-highlight medbox">and in the United States, no programmes have been developed and tested in developing countries. Different cultural backgrounds, budget restrictions, and other difficulties may render treatment packages created in high income countries difficult for adoption by developing nations. We performed a pilot double-blind, randomized, controlled trial in order to investigate the efficacy and feasibility of an attention and memory training programme specially created in
a developing nation. The intervention used simple, widely available materials, required minimal infrastructure, and was conducted in groups.The sample included seventeen stable Brazilians with schizophrenia. Sessions were conducted weekly during five months. The cognitive training group showed significant improvements in inhibitory control and set-shifting over time. Both groups showed improvements in symptoms, processing speed, selective attention, executive function, and long-term visual memory. Improvements were found in the control group in long-term verbal memory and concentration. Our findings reinforce the idea that cognitive training in schizophrenia can be constructed using simple resources and infrastructure, facilitating its adoption by developing countries, and it may improve cognition.
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This study examined the quality of facility-based maternal and newborn health care by describing the implementation of recommended practices for maternal and newborn care among health care facilitie...s to determine whether increased training, supervision, and incentives for health workers were associated with implementing these recommended practices.
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Recommendations, resources and references
A publication of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society
The goal of this course is to provide participants with the foundational skills needed to begin the development, implementation and ongoing improvement of a congenital anomalies surveillance programme, in particular for countries with limited ... class="attribute-to-highlight medbox">resources. It focuses on the methodology needed to develop either population-based or hospital based surveillance programmes.
A set of congenital anomalies will be used as examples throughout this course. The specific examples used are typically severe enough that they would probably be captured within the first few days after birth, have a significant public health impact and, for some of them, have the potential for primary prevention.
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The toolkit aims to provide researchers with guidance for improving the quality of studies that use administrative data to better ascertain child maltreatment incidence, response and service delivery. However, these are complex studies to conduct, <...span class="attribute-to-highlight medbox">and the toolkit is not meant to be comprehensive. Researchers using the toolkit should be prepared to follow up on the recommended resources contained within and to consult with other professionals, such as statisticians, to further improve the research design and execution
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GHWA Task Force on Scaling Up Education and Training for Health Workers
Cancer centres are a major resource in ensuring a comprehensive approach to cancer treatment and its planning. As part of a new roadmap developed b...y WHO and IAEA to help countries design national cancer control programmes, this publication proposes a framework to develop a cancer centre and/or to strengthen the provision of services in an existing cancer centre. The publication provides the features of multidisciplinary cancer care and details the infrastructure, human resources and equipment for different services. This framework is expected to be used as a guide to implementation, taking into consideration the local context and resources.
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This guide is strongly practice -oriented and intended as an open resource when replicating similar methods of psychosocial care in other projects. It describes the steps in the developm...ent of our pilot project
"Low threshold psychosocial support for refugees and asylum seekers’ in Germany ", from the initial idea of the project to its practical implementation. It is to be understood as apractical report for transferring the working methods of MSF from project countries to the German context. A particular focus is the training and working methods of psychosocial peer counsellors. They are at the heart of our approach to low-
threshold psychosocial care
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This is an open-access training course for frontline healthcare providers who manage acute illness and injury with limited resources. Produced in r...esponse to requests from multiple countries and international partners, the BEC package includes a Participant Workbook and electronic slide decks for each module. Integrating the guidance from WHO Emergency Triage, Assessment and Treatment (ETAT) for children and the Integrated Management of Adult/Adolescent Illness (IMAI), BEC teaches a systematic approach to the initial assessment and management of time-sensitive conditions where early intervention saves lives
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The Extending Service Delivery (ESD) project has developed Healthy Timing and Spacing of
Pregnancy: A Trainer’s Reference Guide as a resource for trainers in developing in-service ...tribute-to-highlight medbox">training
for facility-based healthcare providers and community health workers (chws) who already have
some basic experience with and understanding of FP/RH. This is not a training manual, but a
reference guide which can be used and adapted by trainers based on whether or not trainees are facilitybased
or community-based.
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A training package for building capacity of healthcare teams in health facilities for continous quality improvement of maternal and newborn healthcare. The focus is on the care of mothers ...s="attribute-to-highlight medbox">and newborns at the time of child birth since a large proportion of maternal deaths, newborn deaths and stillbirths happen around that time.
The 4-Step POCQI (Point of care Quality Improvement) package includes Coaching manual and Learner manual that present a demystified and simple model of quality improvement at the level of health facilities using local data to identify quality gaps, analyse underlying causes and improve health care practices in their own specific context without much additional resources.
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a) the background to the development of the Church social teaching on migration
b) some of the additional resources that lie within the wider social tradition that might help us think theologically about migration in the current context
c) brief c...oncluding note on Islam, migration and dialogue.
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Human rights must be at the centre of all prevention, preparedness, containment and treatment efforts from the start, in order to best protect public health ...x">and support the groups and people who are most at risk. States have an obligation to protect and guarantee everyone the right to the highest attainable standard of health.
All European states have committed to fulfilling the right to health and have signed international and regional human rights treaties to that purpose. In the context of the current pandemic, authorities should engage all available resources to counter the pandemic while fulfilling the right to health.
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The WHO Disability-Inclusive Health Services Training Package is a companion to the “WHO Disability-Inclusive Health Services Toolkit: A resource for health facilities in the Western Pacific Regio...n” published by WHO in 2020. This package offers a range of additional training materials including presentations, workbooks and videos that will allow users to develop the foundational skills and understanding of the Toolkit for its implementation. Together the Toolkit and Training Package will help ensure equitable access to health services, best-quality outcomes and improved quality of life for all people with disabilities to achieve universal health coverage.
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Produced by UNICEF and IRC, with the support of the German Corporation for International Cooperation GmbH (GIZ) and the generous funding from the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation ...n class="attribute-to-highlight medbox">and Development (BMZ), the Caring for Child Survivors of Sexual Abuse (CCS) Resource Package (Second Edition, 2023) is a revision of the original CCS Guidelines and associated Training (First Edition, 2012). The Second Edition offers an up-to-date global technical guidance on providing a model of quality care for children and families affected by sexual abuse in humanitarian settings. The new resources include both revised and content additions based on practitioner feedback, the most recent evidence and learning. In particular, the Guidelines aim to bring a stronger focus on gender inequality, intersectionality, as well as the connections between the best interests of the child and a survivor-centered approach.
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A framework for planning, developing and implementing solutions with and for young people.
The guidance presented in this document is intended for digital health intervention designers, developers,... implementers, researchers and funders. Newcomers to digital health can use it as a start-to-finish primer on how to collaboratively and responsibly develop youth-centred digital health interventions. Those already engaged in this work can jump directly to the chapters and sections with the ideas and resources they need. Funders will find helpful advice in Annex 1, which outlines special considerations for making smarter, more meaningful investments in digital health interventions for young people.
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