WHO, in partnership with the International Society for Prosthetics and Orthotics (ISPO) and the United States Agency
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for International Development (USAID), has published global standards for prosthetics and orthotics. Its aim is to ensure that prosthetics and orthotics services are people-centred and responsive to every individual’s personal and environmental needs. The standards advocate for the integration of prosthetics and orthotics services into health services, under universal health coverage. Implementation of these standards will support countries to fulfil their obligations under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and towards the Sustainable Development Goals, in particular Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
The standards provide guidance on the development of national policies, plans and programmes for prosthetics and orthotics services of the highest standard. The standards are divided into two documents: the standards and an implementation manual. Both documents cover four areas of the health system:
policy (governance, financing and information);
products (prostheses and orthoses);
personnel (workforce);
and provision of services.
The Standards have been developed through consultation with experts from around the globe via a steering group, development group and external review group.
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Q8. SCOPING QUESTION: In people with bipolar disorders who require maintenance treatment, are a) antipsychotics or b) mood stabilizers (lithium, valproate or carbamazepine) effective and safe?
Results
Recommendations• NGOs should provide MHPSS services with a focus on empowerment and self-reliance
• Introduce interventions focusing on pain mechanisms, coping strategies and physical
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resilience
• Implement livelihood programmes
• Increase service accessibility and outreach activities
• Provide support groups for people who have lost a close family member
• Highlight the importance of supervision and training
• Ensure high quality service provisions by applying relevant outcome measures and to further contribute to the evidence base for MHPSS
• Diversify MHPSS activities to different target groups, including men and women, and address the needs of elderly and individuals with disabilities
This study provides evidence of a large gap between the need of MHPSS among Syrian refugees and provided services. Of the 1082 respondents in this study, 62% expressed that they needed assistance to deal with physical pain and distress. Almost 80% reported being in pain, of which 27% were in severe or very severe pain. Additionally, 55% suffer from distress and 56% rate their own health as fair or poor. Even among the 18-25-yearolds, the prevalence of reporting their overall health as fair was 30.7%. For functionality levels, 28.5% felt severely or extremely emotionally affected by their health problems, and more than 20% had serious difficulties in doing day-to-day work. On the other hand, the majority (72-74%) had no problems in maintaining friendships and participating in community activities
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The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) showed
that global commitment and collective action
could significantly reduce the disease burdens of
three deadly communicable diseases: HIV/AIDS,
tuberculosis (TB)
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and malaria. The MDGs helped
focus efforts on these three deadly diseases
and leveraged disease-specific programmes and
financing, thus achieving significant progress.
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This document provides an overview of strategic purchasing of nutrition services within primary health care. It introduces key terms and payment methods f
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or countries to use in preparing to transform their health financial systems to scale up nutrition services. It does so by introducing nutritional perspectives to strategic health purchasing core areas: What to buy, From whom to buy and How to buy.
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The authors state that researchers, governments and global agencies should proceed with particular care in the evaluation of candidate SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in LMICs, with effective communication to b
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uild trust and avoid generation of vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine efficacy is often highly variable between high-resource and low-resource settings
Archives of Disease in Childhood, vol.106 Issue 2
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The PHC STGs and EML should be used by healthcare workers providing care at clinics, community health centres, and gateway clinics at hospitals.
P
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harmaceutical and Therapeutics Committees (PTCs) are responsible for ensuring the availability of medicines listed in the PHC EML at those facilities, as well as at higher levels of care.
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The aims of these guidelines are to provide guidance to health-care providers (i.e. the end-users of these guidelines: physicians, nurses, pharmacists and caregivers) on the adequate relief of pain
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associated with cancer. They also assist policy-makers, programme managers and public health personnel to create and facilitate appropriately balanced policies on opioids and prescribing regulations for effective and safe cancer pain management. Proper and effective stewardship of opioid analgesics in the cancer treatment setting is essential to ensure the safety of patients and to reduce the risk of diversion of medicine into society.
The goal of cancer pain management is to relieve pain to a level that allows for an acceptable quality of life.
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Summary of the main report: Direct and indirect effects of COVID-19 pandemic and response in South Asia .
It uses a series of exercises based on actual observed changes in services
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and intervention coverage to model impacts on mortality, hospitalizations, and ICU admissions due to COVID-19. It also models the impact of nationwide stay-at-home orders to curb the spread of COVID-19 on maternal and child mortality, educational attainment of children, and the region’s economy. The study focuses on South Asia’s six most populous countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka and makes the case for interventions and strategies to minimise these indirect consequences.
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Action on behalf of unaccompanied and separated children should be guided by principles enshrined in international standards. The validity of these principles has been confirmed by experience
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and lessons learnt from conflicts and natural disasters in recent years. The objective of the present publication is to outline the guiding principles which form the basis for action in this regard.
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This publication summarizes the facilitators and barriers that will be encountered in the deinstitutionalization process and identifies useful and
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proven interventions in Latin American and Caribbean countries. Four areas of work are identified with the respective guidelines or suggestions for action, which should provide an operational guide for countries that are restructuring mental health services and moving toward the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric care.
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2nd edition.
Like the original, this second edition of the guidance aims to inform the revision of existing national guidelines and standards for managing Tuberculosis (TB), many of which include g
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uidance on children. It includes recommendations, based on the best available evidence, for improving the management of children with TB and of children living in families with TB. National and regional TB control programmes may wish to adapt these recommendations according to local circumstances
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In South Africa, young women and girls are exposed to extremely high levels of gender-based violence (GBV) and HIV infection. Given the links betwe
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en the two epidemics, it is important that HIV prevention programmes also address violence against women and children. The Global Fund’s Young Women and Girls (YWG) programme is a multi-pronged HIV prevention programme targeting young women and girls and was implemented in 10 districts in South Africa from April 2016 to March 2019. This briefing paper reports on the lessons learnt from a process evaluation of the child protection component of the programme
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The guidance provides critical considerations and practical checklists to keep schools safe. It also advises national and local authorities on how to adapt
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and implement emergency plans for educational facilities.
In the event of school closures, the guidance includes recommendations to mitigate against the possible negative impacts on children’s learning and wellbeing. This means having solid plans in place to ensure the continuity of learning, including remote learning options such as online education strategies and radio broadcasts of academic content, and access to essential services for all children. These plans should also include necessary steps for the eventual safe reopening of schools.
Where schools remain open, and to make sure that children and their families remain protected and informed.
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Nutrition training of health and agriculture workers can help to reduce child undernutrition. Specifically, trained health extension workers cancontribute through frequent nutrition counselling of caregivers. Evidence from systematic reviews has sho
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wed that providing nutrition training targeting health workers can improve feeding frequency, energy intake, and dietary diversity of children aged six months to two years. Scaling up of nutrition training for health and agriculture workers presents a potential entry point to improve nutrition status among childrenFood insecurity and nutrition deficiency are a common phenomenon in Ethiopia.
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Validation of elimination of mother-to-child transmission, or vertical transmission, of HIV, syphilis and hepatitis B virus (HBV), is an attestation that a country has successfully met standard criteria fo
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r elimination, or for being at 1 of the 3 levels of achievement on the ‘Path to Elimination’ while delivering quality services for women, girls and their children, through the life-course, respecting human rights and ensuring gender equality and community engagement.
This document, the third version, adds on EMTCT of hepatitis B virus (HBV), bringing together a package of interventions and metrics to support integrated management and monitoring of vertical transmission across a wide range of epidemiological and programmatic contexts.
This document, the third version, adds on EMTCT of hepatitis B virus (HBV), bringing together a package of interventions and metrics to support integrated management and monitoring of vertical transmission across a wide range of epidemiological and programmatic contexts.
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This report brings attention to achieving gender equality in the context of women, girls, and the HIV response. This six-month consultation in 2016 with adolescent women and
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young girls found that #WhatWomenWant is: collaboration and joint action by all to invest in women's HIV and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR), to be leaders and articulate the priorities of women and girls in all their diversity, and to speak to the new Political Declaration on AIDS and the SDG framework as a tool for civil society to meet their agenda to achieve gender equality in the HIV and SRHR response.
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Senegal has adopted the World Health Organization–Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS recommended 90-90-90 targets.5 The adoption of this strategy means that the country is expected, by 2020, to have 90% of its population living with HIV diagnosed, 90% of all those diagnosed receiving susta
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ined HIV treatment, and 90% of those receiving antiretroviral therapy having suppressed viral load measures.5 To achieve these outcomes, having good clinical laboratory services for diagnosis and follow-up will be critical.6 More specifically, investments will be needed to improve laboratory infrastructure, and to facilitate the access and availability of routine viral load and early infant diagnosis (EID) measures through the implementation of point-of-care (POC) diagnostic platforms along with an efficient and sustainable quality assurance programme.
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