The KNAP 2018 - 2022 is the second National Nutrition Action Plan that operationalizes the National Food and Nutrition Security Policy 2012 and its implementation framework (NFNSP-IF) 2017–2022.
These guidelines form part of efforts to institutionalize the prevention and containment of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in healthcare facilities in South Africa, as outlined in the Antimicrobial Resistance Strategic Framework and Implementation Plan. The focus of these guidelines is on two interr...elated aspects of prevention of healthcare associated infections (HAIs) and their spread; and the application of antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) practices at hospital level. They aim to serve as a practical, step-by-step or ‘how-to’ guide, addressing the infection prevention and AMS components of a robust response in a hospital. They draw on
evidence from various international guidance documents and standards for interventions that have been shown to be successful in infection
prevention and AMS programmes. These interventions have been customised to the South African hospital setting based on local
experiences in the public and private health sectors. This was done through a series of workshops and requests for comment involving
country-level experts.
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The strategic framework gives guidance to public and private health facilities and health workers on compliance with standards relating to IPC practices. To further assist health facilities to implement the IPC strategic framework, this practical implementation manual has been developed in parallel ...to accompany the document.
These implementation strategies should be read in conjunction with the National Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) Strategic Framework (2020) to support an IPC programme at health facility level towards reducing healthcare-associated infections (HAI) and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). This manual is aligned with the World Health Organization (WHO) Core Component IPC programme recommendations and highlights the essentials for developing and improving IPC at health facility level in a systematic, stepwise manner for South Africa. It supports the Framework for the Prevention and Containment of AMR in South African Hospitals (2018).
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The Lancet. 13 March 2022. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02868-3. Previous Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) studies have reported
national health estimates for Ethiopia. Substantial regional variations in socioeconomic status, population, demography, and access to hea...lth care within Ethiopia require comparable estimates at the subnational level. The GBD 2019 Ethiopia subnational analysis aimed to measure the progress and disparities in health across nine regions and two chartered cities.
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BACKGROUND: Growing political attention to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) offers a rare opportunity for achieving meaningful action. Many governments have developed national AMR action plans, but most have not yet implemented policy interventions to reduce antimicrobial overuse. A systematic evidenc...e map can support governments in making evidence-informed decisions about implementing programs to reduce AMR, by identifying, describing, and assessing the full range of evaluated government policy options to reduce antimicrobial use in humans.
METHODS AND FINDINGS: Seven databases were searched from inception to January 28, 2019, (MEDLINE, CINAHL, EMBASE, PAIS Index, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Web of Science, and PubMed). We identified studies that (1) clearly described a government policy intervention aimed at reducing human antimicrobial use, and (2) applied a quantitative design to measure the impact. We found 69 unique evaluations of government policy interventions carried out across 4 of the 6 WHO regions. These evaluations included randomized controlled trials (n = 4), non-randomized controlled trials (n = 3), controlled before-and-after designs (n = 7), interrupted time series designs (n = 25), uncontrolled before-and-after designs (n = 18), descriptive designs (n = 10), and cohort designs (n = 2). From these we identified 17 unique policy options for governments to reduce the human use of antimicrobials. Many studies evaluated public awareness campaigns (n = 17) and antimicrobial guidelines (n = 13); however, others offered different policy options such as professional regulation, restricted reimbursement, pay for performance, and prescription requirements. Identifying these policies can inform the development of future policies and evaluations in different contexts and health systems. Limitations of our study include the possible omission of unpublished initiatives, and that policies not evaluated with respect to antimicrobial use have not been captured in this review.
CONCLUSIONS: To our knowledge this is the first study to provide policy makers with synthesized evidence on specific government policy interventions addressing AMR. In the future, governments should ensure that AMR policy interventions are evaluated using rigorous study designs and that study results are published.
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This guideline aims to improve the quality of essential, routine postnatal care for women and newborns with the ultimate goal of improving maternal and newborn health and well-being. It recognizes a “positive postnatal experience” as a significant end point for all women giving birth and their n...ewborns, laying the platform for improved short- and long-term health and well-being. A positive postnatal experience is defined as one in which women, newborns, partners, parents, caregivers and families receive information, reassurance and support in a consistent manner from motivated health workers; where a resourced and flexible health system recognizes the needs of women and babies, and respects their cultural context.
This is a consolidated guideline of new and existing recommendations on routine postnatal care for women and newborns receiving facility- or community-based postnatal care in any resource setting.
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National-scale databases and reliability issue
Background report
In emergency or humanitarian settings, mobile clinics are used to bring essential lifesaving health care to communities affected by crises. Though there are standard emergency benefit packages for health services during emergencies, there are however no agreed or standard way of running mobile clini...cs in such settings. Drawing on the experiences of running mobile clinics in the NWSW and relevant literature, this manual provides a practical example of how to set up and run a mobile clinic in an African humanitarian setting in hard to reach communities with limited resources.
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Combined questionnaire Core
Despite its rich culture, great economic potential, high level of education and last but not least its sheer size – it is the largest state whose borders lie entirely within Europe and is 1.7 times the size of the Federal Republic of Germany – Ukraine seems far away in perception and awareness. ...Publications on recent dramatic events, such as the Ukraine conflict or the Crimea crisis, have done little to change this. In fact, the armed conflict in the eastern Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, which has been ongoing since February 2014, is still a burdening feature of many political and economic difficulties destabilizing the country. News coverage of health issues in Ukraine has recently been dominated by highly critical reports on the handling of the Covid 19 pandemic. This pandemic exacerbated existing weaknesses in the Ukrainian health care system, but at least it did not create any new ones.
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The Greater Horn of Africa is experiencing one of the worst food insecurity situations in decades. It is estimated
that more than 37 million people are in Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)1 phase 3 or above and approximately 7 million children under the age of five are acutely mal...nourished in the region. While finding food and safe water is the absolute priority, the health response is essential to avert preventable disease and death.
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The World Health Organization's fourth Country Cooperation Strategy 2022-2026 is an outcome of a consultative process with inputs from the Ministry of Health, various agencies in the health sector, and other relevant stakeholders. It has been developed to provide strategic direction and support towa...rd achieving the priorities of the Government of the Kingdom of Eswatini.
It is designed to support the strengthening of health systems and services toward the attainment of Universal Health
Coverage (UHC) and the Sustainable Development Goals targets. The CCS 2022-2026 also presents the collaborative
agenda between the Kingdom of Eswatini and the three levels of WHO, aligns with the strategic priorities of WHO’s
13th General Programme of Work (2019 – 2025), as well as Eswatini’s United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework (UNSDCF) 2021-2025
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Over 6 million people worldwide are infected with Trypanosoma cruzi, the protozoan that causes Chagas disease
(CD). T. cruzi is transmitted by triatomine insects, congenitally, through uncontrolled blood donations and organ transplants,
and via consumption of food or drink contaminated by triatomi...nes.
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The NDMS&IP focuses on mainstreaming disability to promote equitable access to services in the six thematic areas of health, education, livelihoods, empowerment, and social inclusion and cross-cutting issues.
The first part of the NDMS&IP outlines incongruences between national and sectoral policie...s and pieces of legislation on one hand, and practice on the other and identifies key priority areas/themes of the strategy,
medium-term outcomes and strategies for each identified priority area/ theme. This process is largely informed by key findings and recommendations from a study on the Situation of Persons with Disabilities
in Malawi (CBMM/NAD, 2011). The study provides background descriptive information on existing national and sectoral policy and legal framework, level of access by children, adult women and males with disabilities to services in the areas of education, health, livelihoods and other social services as well as of participation by persons with disabilities through self-representation in development activities at various levels. A review of relevant documents at the international level further describes the disability situation in Malawi in the global context.
The second part of the NDMS&IP consists of the operational matrix, (Annex 1), a monitoring and evaluation framework (Annex 2) and budget estimates (Annex 3). This part outlines specific actions by various actors both in the public, private and civil society sectors to prioritise disability in their routine policy, programming, resource mobilisation and allocation, monitoring, evaluation and reporting routines. The action plan lays out priority sectors and concrete actions by setting out implementation schedules, defining targets, assigning responsibility to key duty bearers and rights holders for coordination, decision-making, monitoring and reporting, mobilisation and allocation and control of resources.
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Securing a minimum of financial resources permitting to bring the full range of critical health services to all people constitutes a fundamental human right and an indispensable condition for human dignity. The model outlined here demonstrates that it is within our reach to close the financing gap e...ven for the poorest countries by 2020 if all governments, from the privileged and underprivileged parts of the world alike, just fulfil the commitments and recommendations for financing human development and health that already were agreed many years ago.
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Follow up to the so called Abuja Declaration ten years later: In April 2001, heads of state of African Union countries met and pledged to set a target of allocating at least 15% of their annual budget to improve the health sector. At the same time, they urged donor countries to "fulfil the yet to be... met target of 0.7% of their GNP as official Development Assistance (ODA) to developing countries". This drew attention to the shortage of resources necessary to improve health in low income settings.
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Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are the second common cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) accounting for about 35% of all deaths, after a composite of communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases. Despite prior perception of low NCDs mortality rates, current evidence suggests t...hat SSA is now at the dawn of the epidemiological transition with contemporary double burden of disease from NCDs and communicable diseases. In SSA, cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the most frequent causes of NCDs deaths, responsible for approximately 13% of all deaths and 37% of all NCDs deaths. Although ischemic heart disease (IHD) has been identified as the leading cause of CVDs mortality in SSA followed by stroke and hypertensive heart disease from statistical models, real field data suggest IHD rates are still relatively low. The neglected endemic CVDs of SSA such as endomyocardial fibrosis and rheumatic heart disease as well as congenital heart diseases remain unconquered. While the underlying aetiology of heart failure among adults in high-income countries (HIC) is IHD, in SSA the leading causes are hypertensive heart disease, cardiomyopathy, rheumatic heart disease, and congenital heart diseases. Of concern is the tendency of CVDs to occur at younger ages in SSA populations, approximately two decades earlier compared to HIC. Obstacles hampering primary and secondary prevention of CVDs in SSA include insufficient health care systems and infrastructure, scarcity of cardiac professionals, skewed budget allocation and disproportionate prioritization away from NCDs, high cost of cardiac treatments and interventions coupled with rarity of health insurance systems. This review gives an overview of the descriptive epidemiology of CVDs in SSA, while contrasting with the HIC and highlighting impediments to their management and making recommendations.
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