One of the many gender inequities in the health and care workforce that COVID-19 has exposed is around the fit and design of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). The rapid onset and scale of COVID-1...9 led to shortages of PPE in most countries, causing preventable infection and mortality among healthcare workers and others on the front lines. Even though most health workers are women, manufacturing specifications for medical PPE are usually drawn up based on the male body and there have been many reports of PPE not designed for women's bodies.
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To survive and thrive, children and adolescents need good health, adequate nutrition, security, safety and a supportive clean environment, opportunities for early learning and education, responsive relationships and connectedness, and opportunities ...for personal autonomy and self-realization. To promote their health and wellbeing, children and adolescents need support from parents, families, communities, surrounding institutions, and an enabling environment. Scheduled well care visits provide a critical opportunity for support of individual children, adolescents, parents, caregivers and families promote health and wellbeing. This guidance on scheduled child and adolescent well-care visits is the first in a series of publications to support the operationalization of the comprehensive agenda for child and adolescent health and wellbeing. It provides guidance on what is required to strengthen health systems and services to ensure healthy growth and development of all children and adolescents, and to support their parents and caregivers.
The guidance focuses on scheduled routine contacts with providers to support children and adolescents in their growth and developmental trajectory, as well as their primary caregivers and families. It outlines the rationale and objectives of well care visits and proposes a minimum 17 scheduled visits; describes the expected tasks during a contact; provides age-specific content to be address during each contact; and proposes actions to build on and maximize existing opportunities and resources.
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Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2018 Jun; 15(6): 1279.
Published online 2018 Jun 16. doi: 10.3390/ijerph15061279
Infection Prevention and Control Programmes
January 2020
The WHO South-East Asia (SEA) Region bears a high burden of tuberculosis (TB) and MDR-TB. In 2015, the Region accounted for nearly 200 000 or 35% of the global estimated new RR/MDR-TB cases eligible for treatment. Extensively drug-resis...tant TB (XDRTB) has also been reported from six countries of the SEA Region. MDR-TB could potentially replace drug-susceptible TB, and constitutes a threat to global public health security. The South- East Asia Regional Response Framework for DR-TB 2017–2021 complements the Ending TB in the South-East Asia Region: Regional Strategic Plan 2016–2020” and outlines key strategies for reducing morbidity, mortality and transmission of DR-TB.
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The ICOPE Implementation Framework provides a score card to help assess the overall capacity of health and social care services and systems to deliver integrated ...medbox">care in community settings and support the development of ICOPE implementation action plans. There are 19 actions needed to implement ICOPE on the services level (meso) and systems level (macro). The scoring process provides an evidence-based means of highlighting areas for improvement as well as establishing concrete measures of future improvements
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Humanitarian emergencies and crises (Humanitarian emergencies and crises) are large-scale events that may result in the breakdown of health care systems and society, forced displacement, death, and ...physical, psychological, social and spiritual suffering on a massive scale. Current responses to Humanitarian emergencies and crises rightfully focus on saving lives, but for both ethical and medical reasons, the prevention and relief of pain, as well as other physical and psychological symptoms, social and spiritual distress, also are imperative. Therefore, palliative care, should be integrated into responses to Humanitarian emergencies and crises. The principles of humanitarianism and impartiality require that all patients receive care and should never be abandoned for any reason, even if they are dying. Thus, there is significant overlap in the principles and mission of palliative care and humanitarianism: relief of suffering; respect for the dignity of all people; support for basic needs; and accompaniment during the most difficult of times
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The objective of this guideline is to present the complete set of all WHO recommendations and best practice statements relating to abortion. While legal, regulatory, policy and service-delivery contexts may vary from country to country, the recommendations and best practices described in this docume...nt aim to enable evidence-based decision-making with respect to quality abortion care.
This guideline updates and replaces the recommendations in all previous WHO guidelines on abortion care
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The objectives of these WHO guidelines are to provide updated evidence- based recommendations for the treatment of persons with hepatitis C infection using, where possible, all DAA-only combinations. The guidelines also provide recommendations on the preferred regimens based on a patient’s HCV gen...otype and clinical history, and assess the appropriateness of continued use of certain medicines. This document also includes existing recommendations on screening for HCV infection and care of persons infected with HCV that were first issued in 2014
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Technical Series on Safer Primary Care
Good primary care may lead to fewer avoidable hospitalizations, but unsafe primary care can cause avoidable illness and injury, leading to unnecessary hospitalizations, and in some cases, disability... and even death.Implementing system changes and practices are crucial to improve safety at all levels of health care. Recognizing the paucity of accessible information on primary care, World Health Organization (WHO) set up a Safer Primary Care Expert Working Group. The Working Group reviewed the literature, prioritized areas in need of further research and compiled a set of nine monographs which cover selected priority technical topics. WHO is publishing this technical series to make the work of these distinguished experts available to everyone with an interest in Safer Primary Care.The aim of this technical series is to provide a compendium of information on key issues that can impact safety in the provision of primary health care.
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