To survive and thrive, children and adolescents need good health, adequate nutrition, security, safety
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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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This report aims to support countries in the necessary transition toward healthier, more sustainable diets by integrating biodiversity in food-based interventions to support nutrition and health. It is intended to help guide decision-makers in the h
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ealth, nutrition and other sectors, to:
Consider the important role of biodiversity in food systems for the development of integrated interventions to support healthy, diverse and sustainable diets;
To focus investments and country support for more comprehensive, coordinated and cross-cutting public health and nutrition projects and policies; and
To strengthen the resilience of food systems, health systems, and societies, each of which are each increasingly compromised by widespread ecological degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change.
Biodiversity at every level (genetic, species and ecosystem level) is a foundational pillar for food security, nutrition, and dietary quality. It is the basic source of variety in essential foods, nutrients, vitamins and minerals, and medicines, and underpins life-sustaining ecosystem services. It is a core environmental determinant of health, often a vital ingredient of healthy nutritional outcomes and livelihoods, gender equality, social equity, and other health determinants.
Biodiversity can play a more prominent role in planning for nutritional outcomes in various ways, e.g. by facilitating the production of nutritious fruits and plant products, sustaining livelihoods through more efficient production and increasing the diversity of products available in markets. This Guidance presents and expands on six core building blocks for mainstreaming biodiversity for nutrition and health:
Cross-sectoral knowledge development and knowledge co-production;
Enabling environments;
Integration;
Conservation and the wider use of biodiversity;
Education and awareness-raising;
Monitoring and evaluation;
This WHO report builds on an unprecedented opportunity to mainstream biodiversity in order to support healthy and sustainable diets, and offers the necessary technical guidance to catalyze and support a transformation of the global food system and transition to healthier, more sustainable diets.
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This valuable and timely guidebook represents an innovative contribution to enhancing quality education through textbooks. It will change the way textbook authors, publishers and
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educators, as well as governments of the United Nations Member States, see the potential of educational media at a time of growing violent extremism, changing notions of national identity, increasingly globalized and diverse communities, and environmental destruction. The need for education that promotes peace, social justice and global citizenship has become more urgent in a world of greater uncertainty. This guidebook builds on the momentum of Agenda 2030, providing a toolkit to enable textbook authors to place ESD at the core of their subjects in ways that are at once practical for them and interesting and relevant to the students.
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WHO-OHCHR launch new guidance to improve laws addressing human rights abuses in mental health care
Ahead of World Mental Health Day, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Office of the High
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Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR) are jointly launching a new guidance, entitled "Mental health, human rights and legislation: guidance and practice", to support countries to reform legislation in order to end human rights abuses and increase access to quality mental health care.
Human rights abuses and coercive practices in mental health care, supported by existing legislation and policies, are still far too common. Involuntary hospitalization and treatment, unsanitary living conditions and physical, psychological, and emotional abuse characterize many mental health services across the world.
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The report offers an analysis of the broader challenges to securing humanitarian action and recommends areas for improvement. This study will contribute to improving the way humanitarians ‘do busi
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ness’ in complex
security environments. Document also available in French, Arabic and Spanish.
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Gender-based violence is a life-threatening, global health and human rights issue that violates international human rights law
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and principles of gender equality. It is also a threat to lasting peace and an affront to our common humanity. United Nations Member States have called for urgent action to end GBV in emergencies, recognizing that in crises, the risk of GBV is heightened, particularly for women and adolescent girls.
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Practical Guidance for collaborative interventions
Practical Guideline for collaborative interventions
Specific action sheets offer useful guidance on mental health and psychosocial support and cover the following areas coordination assessment monitoring an
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d evaluation protection and human rights standards human resources community mobilisation and support health services education dissemination of information food security and nutrition shelter and site planning and water and sanitationthe guidelines include a matrix with guidance for emergency planning actions to be taken in the early stages of an emergency and comprehensive responses needed in the recovery and rehabilitation phases
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Practical Guidance for collaborative interventions
This report situates disability and inclusion within the broader context of sustainable development, with a particular focus on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The paper provides background on the historical role of the UN in promoting inc
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lusion and outlines the current trends and challenges facing people with disabilities globally. The following section presents these challenges within the context of the SDGs, showing that disability needs to be tackled if the SDGs are to be achieved. It concludes with a number of recommendations for a disability-inclusive 2030 agenda for sustainable development
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This report is primarily intended for the community of policymakers and researchers concerned about the rising risks of domestic, regional, and glo
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bal infectious disease epidemics, and the collective failure to take the coordinated actions required to reduce such risks. These risks include the expected health, economic, and societal costs that are borne by countries, regions, and even all nations in the case of pandemics (which are worldwide epidemics). These risks also include the consequences of increasing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and its spread within regions and globally. A necessary first step is to monitor whether a broad range of stakeholders are acting to prevent outbreaks from becoming epidemics, whether their capacities to respond to epidemics are robust, and whether preparedness to respond to pandemics and limit the resulting economic and health damage is improving. Analyzing the adequacy of these efforts is vitally important for the decisions of policymakers to invest in the public health and disaster-risk management capacities. Early and effective control of disease outbreaks prevents substantial health and economic costs whether or not the disease can spread globally and become a pandemic.
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The magnitude of urban disasters, high population densities, and a complex social, political and institutional environment has challenged the manne
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r in which humanitarian agencies are used to working. Humanitarian agencies are now grappling with how to change their approaches to this reality. This desk review aims to provide an audit and analysis of existing needs assessments, response analysis frameworks and targeting approaches for use in urban post-conflict emergency response.
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This 400 page guide, created by PHI’s Center for Climate Change and Health and the American Public Health Association (APHA), with support from t
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he California Department of Public Health helps local health departments prepare for and mitigate climate change effects—from drought and heat to flooding and food security—with concrete, implementable suggestions.
The guide: Provides a basic summary of climate change and climate impacts on health; Prioritizes health equity, explains the disproportionate impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities, and targets solutions first to the communities where they are most needed, including low-income, elderly and people of color communities; Connects what we know about climate impacts and climate solutions with the work of local health departments; and Offers specific examples of how local health departments can address and ameliorate the impacts of climate change in every area of public health practice.
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