People younger than 20 years comprise 35% of the global population and 40% of the global population of least-developed nations. The number of children - neonates, infants, children, and adolescents up to 19 years of age - who need pediatric palliative care (PPC) each year may be as high as 21 millio...n. Another study found that almost 2.5 million children die each year with serious health related suffering and that more than 98% of these children are in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) (3). While estimates differ, there is no doubt that there is an enormous need for prevention and relief of suffering among children - for PPC.
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The purpose of the landscape analysis is ultimately to facilitate improved engagement of private providers, thereby contributing to universal access to quality and affordable TB care and the end of the TB epidemic. It focuses on the role of private for-profit providers and on specific challenges and... experiences in engaging them for TB prevention and care.
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The ASEAN Mental Health Systems Report
catalogues the situation of mental health in ASEAN
Member States. This report provides comprehensive
information on the progress made so far by AMS in
inte...grating mental health into national health systems,
increasing access to care as well as challenges faced.
It also offers recommendations on how to improve the mental health system in
respective ASEAN Member States.
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Suicide is largely preventable. Unlike for many other health issues, the tools to significantly reduce the most tragic loss of life by suicide are available. With collective action to acknowledge and address this serious problem, as well as commitme...nt to effective interventions, supported by political will and resources, preventing suicide globally is within reach. Importantly, it is a
national suicide prevention strategy that allows communities to come together, and begin to tackle suicide and the issues specific to their needs without stigmatization.
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How WHO works to prevent drug use, reduce harm and improve safe access to medicines
This document provides an overview of specific health care waste technologies for the treatment of solid infectious and sharp waste. For each technology, details of its operation, effects on the environment and ...dbox">health, requirements for installation, capacities for treating waste, examples of consumables and advantages and disadvantages are described. The document is designed for health care facility administrators and planners, WASH and infection prevention control staff, national planners, donors and partners.
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The aim of this guidance is to enhance the capacity of health care facilities to protect and improve the health of their target communities in an unstable and changing climate; and to empower ...class="attribute-to-highlight medbox">health care facilities to be environmentally sustainable, by optimizing the use of resources and minimizing the release of waste into the environment. Climate resilient and environmentally sustainable health care facilities contribute to high quality of care and accessibility of services, and by helping reduce facility costs also ensure better affordability. They are, therefore, an important component of universal health coverage (UHC).
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Thefirst report on Latin America and the Carribean presents key indicators on health and health systems in 33 Latin America and the Caribbean countries. . Analysis is based on the latest comparable... data across almost 100 indicators including equity, health status, determinants of health, health care resources and utilisation, health expenditure and financing, and quality of care. The editorial discusses the main challenges for the region brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as managing the outbreak as well as mobilising adequate resources and using them efficiently to ensure an effective response to the epidemic.
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14 January 2021
This practical guide can be used to help countries monitor and analyse the impact of COVID-19 on essential health services to inform planning and decision-making. It provides practical recommendations on how to use key performance i...ndicators to analyse changes in access to and delivery of essential health services within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic; how to visualize and interpret these data; and how to use the findings to guide modifications for safe delivery of services and transitioning towards restoration and recovery. The guide focuses on existing indicators and data that are captured in routine reporting systems and how they can be used by national and subnational authorities to understand specific contexts, challenges and bottlenecks. This guide supports Maintaining essential health services: operational guidance for the COVID-19 context, which provides an integrated framework to guide countries in their efforts to reorganize, adapt and maintain safe delivery of high-priority essential health services within the context of the pandemic.
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Ghana's attempt to regulate health care waste management started in 2002 with the development of guidelines on health care waste manage-ment by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In 2006, t...he Ministry of Health developed the health care waste policy and guidelines. This guidance document improved health care waste management in the country.
With support from the UNDP-GEF medical waste management project, the Ministry of He lth has revised the existing National Health Care Waste Management (HCWM), policy and guideline, 2006 and has produced two separate documents- A National Health Care Waste Management Policy and a National Guideline for Health Care Waste Management
countrywide. This policy is replacing the 2006 policy and introduces new technical and administrative policy issues to enhance waste management in health care facilities.
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Food environments are usually defined as the settings with all the different types of
food made available and accessible to people as they go about their daily lives.
That is, the range of food in supermarkets, small retail outlets, wet markets, street
food stalls, coffee shops, tea houses, s...chool canteens, restaurants, and all the other
venues where people buy and eat food. These environments differ enormously depending on the context. They can be extensive and diverse, with a seemingly endless array of options and price ranges, or they can be sparse, with very few options on offer. Because they determine what food consumers can access at a given moment in time, at what price, and with what degree of convenience, food environments both constrain and prompt the consumer’s choice.Food environments are influenced by the food systems which supply them, and vice versa. Food systems encompass the entire range of activities, people and institutions involved in the production, processing,
marketing, consumption and disposal of food (FAO, 2013). They include but are not limited to food supply chains. Making food systems nutrition-sensitive can contribute to addressing all forms of malnutrition, as food systems determine whether the food needed for good nutrition are available, affordable, acceptable and of adequate
quantity and quality. How closely food systems and food environments are interrelated and interdependent, and the degree to which external factors affect nutrition outcomes, varies from setting to setting.Many of today’s food systems
and food environments are challenged in supporting consumer choices that are
consistent with healthy diets and good nutrition. Consumers are not making choices based on nutrition and health, and poor diet is now the number one risk factor for death and disability worldwide (GBD, 2015). Food systems that do not enable healthy diets are increasingly recognized as an underlying cause of malnutrition (GLOPAN, 2016), and malnutrition, irrespective of form, has a huge cost. Economic costs associated with undernutrition are estimated at $1-2 trillion per year, about 2-3% of global GDP (FAO, 2013); the global economic cost of obesity and associated diet-related non-communicable diseases is estimated at $2 trillion per year, about 2.8% of global GDP (McKinsey, 2014). Influencing food environments for promoting healthy diets is an emerging strategy to address today’s nutrition challenges.
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This document synthesizes key elements of the World Health Organization (WHO) normative guidance on health policy and system support for community health<.../span> worker (CHW) programmes and their application for HIV programmes. Building on relevant elements of HIV guidelines, tools and evidence identified by experts, it provides recommendations on tasks and roles that can be performed by CHWs (including for HIV), identifies the policy and system supports to optimize CHW performance, and gives examples of best practice. Its purpose is to inform the optimal design and delivery of CHW programmes targeting – either specifically or as part of a broader approach – the scale-up and sustainability of HIV services.
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INTRODUCTION: Health service use among the public can decline during outbreaks and had been predicted among low and middle-income countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) sta...rted implementing public health measures across Kinshasa, including strict lock-down measures in the Gombe health zone.
METHODS: Using monthly time series data from the DRC Health Management Information System (January 2018 to December 2020) and interrupted time series with mixed effects segmented Poisson regression models, we evaluated the impact of the pandemic on the use of essential health services (outpatient visits, maternal health, vaccinations, visits for common infectious diseases and non-communicable diseases) during the first wave of the pandemic in Kinshasa. Analyses were stratified by age, sex, health facility and lockdown policy (i.e, Gombe vs other health zones).
RESULTS: Health service use dropped rapidly following the start of the pandemic and ranged from 16% for visits for hypertension to 39% for visits for diabetes. However, reductions were highly concentrated in Gombe (81% decline in outpatient visits) relative to other health zones. When the lock-down was lifted, total visits and visits for infectious diseases and non-communicable diseases increased approximately twofold. Hospitals were more affected than health centres. Overall, the use of maternal health services and vaccinations was not significantly affected.
CONCLUSION: The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in important reductions in health service utilizsation in Kinshasa, particularly Gombe. Lifting of lock-down led to a rebound in the level of health service use but it remained lower than pre-pandemic levels.
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This booklet presents key messages for action, summarized from a set of
chapters on different environmental health issues.
This booklet presents key messages for action, summarized from a set of chapters on different environmental health issues, available at www.who.int/ ceh/publications/healthyenvironmentsforhealthychildren. The work is a result of an on-going partners...hip between WHO, UNEP and UNICEF in the area of children’s environmental health, and seeks to update the 2002 joint publication “Children in the New Millennium: Environmental Impact on Health.”
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