Handbook on pregnancy, childbirth, childhood illnesses, child development and the care of children. The handbook, Facts for Life, provides vital me
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ssages and information for mothers, fathers, other family members and caregivers and communities to use in changing behaviours and practices that can save and protect the lives of children and help them grow and develop to their full potential.
This version of Facts for Life builds on the three previous editions, which have been helping families and communities around the world since 1989. Newborn Health has been added to the Safe Motherhood chapter, giving attention to child survival from the first stage of life. A new chapter, Child Protection, has been included, focusing attention on the actions needed to ensure children grow up in protective environments.
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This document highlights landmarks and key milestones in the development and implementation of the global agenda
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for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) over the last two decades. It summarizes where the world was in 2000, where it is in 2022, and where the world wants to be in terms of NCD prevention and control by 2030. It recalls the commitments made by heads of state and governments, and outlines the technical guidance provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) in support of national efforts to achieve the internationally agreed NCD targets for 2025 and 2030.
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A toolkit for behavioural and social communication in outbreak response
Latin America and the Caribbean is characterized by a matrix of social inequality whose axes —such as
socioeconomic stratum, gender, stage in the life cycle, ethnicity
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and race, territory, disability, and immigration
status— create multiple, often concurrent, situations of exclusion and discrimination. The coronavirus
disease (COVID-19) pandemic has exacerbated wide social gaps and it is no coincidence that Latin America
and the Caribbean is one of the regions in which the health and socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic have
been the most severe, which shows that the costs of inequality are unsustainable
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How should humanitarian organisations prepare and respond to COVID-19 in humanitarian settings in low- and middle-income countries?
This Rapid Learning Review outlines 14 actions, insights
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and ideas for humanitarian actors to consider in their COVID-19 responses. It summarises and synthesises the best available knowledge and guidance for developing a health response to COVID-19 in low- and middle-income settings as at April 2020
The paper, supported by the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock, will be updated throughout 2020 to reflect emerging knowledge and evidence on the most effective approaches to respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
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Background:Neonatal mortality accounts for 43% of global under-five deaths and is decreasing more slowly than maternal or child mortality. Donor funding has increased
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for maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH), but no analysis to date has disaggregated aid for newborns. We evaluated if and how aid flows for newborn care can be tracked, examined changes in the last decade, and considered methodological implications for tracking funding for specific population groups or diseases. MethodsandFindings:We critically reviewed and categorised previous analyses of aid to specific populations, diseases, or types of activities. We then developed and refined key terms related to newborn survival in seven languages and searched titles and descriptions of donor disbursement records in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Creditor Reporting System database, 2002–2010. We compared results with the Countdown to 2015 database of aid for MNCH (2003–2008) and the search strategy used by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Prior to 2005, key terms related to newborns were rare in disbursement records but their frequency increased markedly thereafter. Only two mentions were found of ‘‘stillbirth’’ and only nine references were found to ‘‘fetus’’ in any spelling variant or language
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The report presents the latest data on more than 50 health-related Sustainable Development Goal and "triple billion" target indicators. The 2021 edition includes preliminary estimates
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for global excess deaths attributable to COVID-19 for 2020 and the state of global and regional health trends from 2000-2019. It also focuses on persistent health inequalities and data gaps that have been accentuated by the pandemic, with a call to urgently invest in health information systems to ensure the world is better prepared with better data.
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According to the Report, cascading and interlinked crises are putting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in grave danger, along with human
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ity’s very own survival. The Report highlights the severity and magnitude of the challenges before us. The confluence of crises, dominated by COVID-19, climate change, and conflicts, are creating spin-off impacts on food and nutrition, health, education, the environment, and peace and security, and affecting all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Report details the reversal of years of progress in eradicating poverty and hunger, improving health and education, providing basic services, and much more. It also points out areas that need urgent action in order to rescue the SDGs and deliver meaningful progress for people and the planet by 2030.
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Health in All Policies (HiAP) is not a new concept. While the term “HiAP” has received much attention since the 1990s, the concept
of working across sectors of government for improved population health
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and wellbeing is much older than that. Over the last few decades the term has been applied to multiple health topics and challenges – whetherimplicitly or explicitly.
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Mental, Neurological, and Substance Use Disorders: Disease Control Priorities, Third Edition (Volume 4).
Patel V, Chisholm D, Dua T, et al., editors.
Washington (DC): The International Bank for
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Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank; 2016 Mar 14.
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BMC Health Services Research 14(1):42 · January 2014
The objective of this international comparative study is to describe and compare the mental health policies in seven countries of Eastern Europe that share their common communist history: Bul
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garia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia.
The burden of totalitarian history still influences many areas of social and economic life, which also has to be taken into account in mental health policy. We may observe that after twenty years of health reforms and reforms of health reforms, the transition of the mental health systems still continues. In spite of many reform efforts in the past, a balance of community and hospital mental health services has not been achieved in this part of the world yet.
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World Psychiatry. 2010 Jun;9(2):67-77.
The main recommendations are presented in relation to: the need for coordinated policies, plans and programmes, the requirement to scale up services
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for whole populations, the importance of promoting community awareness about mental illness to increase levels of help-seeking, the need to establish effective financial and budgetary provisions to directly support services provided in the community. The paper concludes by setting out a series of lessons learned from the accumulated practice of community mental health care to date worldwide, with a particular focus on the social and governmental measures that are required at the national level, the key steps to take in the organization of the local mental health system, lessons learned by professionals and practitioners, and how to most effectively harness the experience of users, families, and other advocates
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The Quality Criteria for Health National Adaptation Plans (HNAPs) presents examples of good practice in HNAP development to assist countries in developing a comprehensive, feasible
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and implementable plan. The criteria are also intended to guide countries in setting the foundation for a long-term iterative HNAP process. The proposed criteria are not prescriptive and should be adapted to dynamic country contexts, uncertain and changing climatic conditions, and new knowledge and technologies.
9 February 2021
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As the culminating volume in the DCP3 series, volume 9 will provide an overview of DCP3 findings and methods, a summary of messages and substantive lessons to be taken from DCP3,
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and a further discussion of cross-cutting and synthesizing topics across the first eight volumes. The introductory chapters (1-3) in this volume take as their starting point the elements of the Essential Packages presented in the overview chapters of each volume. First, the chapter on intersectoral policy priorities for health includes fiscal and intersectoral policies and assembles a subset of the population policies and applies strict criteria for a low-income setting in order to propose a "highest-priority" essential package. Second, the chapter on packages of care and delivery platforms for universal health coverage (UHC) includes health sector interventions, primarily clinical and public health services, and uses the same approach to propose a highest priority package of interventions and policies that meet similar criteria, provides cost estimates, and describes a pathway to UHC.
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This document is an output of a WHO cross-programme initiative aiming to improve the prevention, diagnosis and management of anaemia and thereby accelerate reduction in its prevalence. It comes at a
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n important time, midway through the era of the Sustainable Development Goals, when progress in reducing anaemia has stagnated. This framework is based on the core principles of primary health care: meeting people’s health needs through comprehensive promotive, protective, curative, and rehabilitative care along the life course; systematically addressing the broader determinants of health; and empowering individuals, families, and communities to optimize their health
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Teaching the Sustainable Development Goals” provides information about the SDGs, their background, the global reality and offers assistance and s
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uggestions on how to teach and support learning for sustainable development.
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Objective: To identify gaps in national stroke guidelines that could be bridged to enhance the quality of stroke care services in low- and
middle-income countries.
Methods: We systematically searched medical databases
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and websites of medical societies and contacted international organizations.
Country-specific guidelines on care and control of stroke in any language published from 2010 to 2020 were eligible for inclusion. We reviewed
each included guideline for coverage of four key components of stroke services (surveillance, prevention, acute care and rehabilitation).
We also assessed compliance with the eight Institute of Medicine standards for clinical practice guidelines, the ease of implementation of
guidelines and plans for dissemination to target audiences.
Findings: We reviewed 108 eligible guidelines from 47 countries, including four low-income, 24 middle-income and 19 high-income countries.
Globally, fewer of the guidelines covered primary stroke prevention compared with other components of care, with none recommending
surveillance. Guidelines on stroke in low- and middle-income countries fell short of the required standards for guideline development;
breadth of target audience; coverage of the four components of stroke services; and adaptation to socioeconomic context. Fewer low- and
middle-income country guidelines demonstrated transparency than those from high-income countries. Less than a quarter of guidelines
encompassed detailed implementation plans and socioeconomic considerations.
Conclusion: Guidelines on stroke in low- and middle-income countries need to be developed in conjunction with a wider category of
health-care providers and stakeholders, with a full spectrum of translatable, context-appropriate interventions.
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Reflections from disability research using the ICF in Afghanistan and Cambodia | Working Paper Series: No. 11