These guidelines for the prevention and management of cardiovascular diseases are a critical ingredient for streamlining care across the entire health services provision continuum. They are a strategic component in achieving universal health coverage, securing affordable heal...th care and improving the livelihood of all Kenyans which in turn will guarantee a healthy nation working towards sustainable development and prosperity.These guidelines bring to the fore the need for availability of skilled human resource, sustained adequate funding and partnership building at all levels of governance. It provides clear roles for health workers at the different levels of our devolved system which will ensure a harmonized referral system with basic cardiovascular diseases treatment services available closest to the people while decongesting the county and national referral facilities.
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The Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH) has been coordinating sector wide reforms that aim to improve equity and quality of maternal and child health services. As part of these efforts, the ministry is also exerting concerted efforts to improve availability and use of quality... RMNCH pharmaceuticals. Management of RMNCH pharmaceuticals has had significant challenges such as poor availability of essential pharmaceuticals and wastages of valuable resources as pharmacy professionals were not demonstrating the required knowledge, skill and attitude towards availing the pharmaceuticals and ensuring their rational medicine use.
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Background
Low- and middle-income countries now experience the highest prevalence and mortality rates of cardiovascular disease.
Main text
While improving the availability and delivery of proven, effective therapies will no doubt mitigate this burden, we posit that studies evaluating cardiovasc...ular disease risk factors, management strategies and service delivery, in diverse settings and diverse populations, are equally critical to improving outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. Focusing on examples drawn from four cardiovascular diseases — coronary artery disease, stroke, diabetes and kidney disease — we argue that ethnicity, culture and context matter in determining the risk factors for disease as well as the comparative effectiveness of medications and other interventions, particularly diet and lifestyle interventions.
Conclusion
We believe that a host of cohort studies and randomized control trials currently being conducted or planned in low- and middle-income countries, focusing on previously understudied race/ethnic groups, have the potential to increase knowledge about the cause(s) and management of cardiovascular diseases across the world.
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Full eHandbook under: http://www.msh.org/resources/health-systems-in-action-an-ehandbook-for-leaders-and-managers
Effective supply management has the potential to make a powerful contribution to the reliable availability of essential medicines, which are a crucial part of the delivery of highqualit...y health care services. Because medicines are costly and poor management so often results in waste, good supply management is also crucial to the cost-effectiveness of providing medicines.
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The aim of the operational framework is to ensure 1) accurate collection, handling, shipment and storage of specimens collected in countries implementing HIV drug resistance surveillance; and 2) the availability of quality-assured HIV genotyping laboratory services producing comparable and reliable ...results at the national, regional and global levels.
This publication updates the WHO HIVResNet HIV drug resistance laboratory operational framework published in 2017 and reflects technical and strategic developments over the past three years.
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Accessed Online June 2018 | When assessing potential opportunities for family planning, it is important to consider a wide range of areas related to demand for contraception, availability and access to services, quality and equity, and the enabling environment. This opportunity brief brings together... a range of data sources to allow for exploration of these key areas. This brief is meant to provide an overview of key data and population segmentations to spark conversations about prioritization and potential impact. Further analysis, including additional segmentation by residence or region may reveal additional nuances.
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Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world, was devastated by an earthquake in 2010. The disaster uncovered the realities of a non-existent mental health care system with only ten psychiatrists nationwide. Attempts were made to assess the increased prevalence of mental illness, likely due to t...he trauma to which many were exposed. Several interventions were carried out with aims to integrate mental health into primary health care services. The interplay between socio-cultural beliefs and health (both mental and physical) in Haiti has been widely commented upon by both foreign aid and local caregivers. Observations frequently highlight barriers to the willingness of patients to seek care and to their acceptance of biomedicine over traditional Vodou beliefs. The perception of Haitian beliefs as barriers to the availability and acceptance of mental health care has intensified the difficulty in providing effective recommendations and interventions both before and after the earthquake. Argued in this review is the importance of considering the interactions between socio-cultural beliefs and mental health when developing models for the prevention, screening, classification and management of mental illness in Haiti. These interactions, especially relevant in mental health care and post-disaster contexts, need to be acknowledged in any healthcare setting. The successes and failures of Haiti’s situation provide an example for global consideration.
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ABSTRACT
More than 500 million people worldwide live with cardiovascular disease (CVD). Health systems today face fundamental challenges in delivering optimal care due to ageing populations, healthcare workforce constraints, financing, availability and affordability of CVD medicine, and service del...ivery.
Digital health technologies can help address these challenges. They may be a tool
to reach Sustainable Development Goal 3.4 and reduce premature mortality from
non-communicable diseases (NCDs) by a third by 2030. Yet, a range of fundamental barriers prevents implementation and access to such technologies. Health system governance, health provider, patient and technological factors can prevent or distort their implementation.
World Heart Federation (WHF) roadmaps aim to identify essential roadblocks on the pathway to effective prevention, detection, and treatment of CVD. Further, they aim to provide actionable solutions and implementation frameworks for local adaptation. This WHF Roadmap for digital health in cardiology identifies barriers to implementing digital health technologies for CVD and provides recommendations for overcoming them.
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In the context of the Support to National Malaria Control Programme (SuNMaP), demand creation is the strategic combination of advocacy, communication and mobilisation approaches that seek to achieve increased community awareness of, and demand for, effective malaria prevention and treatment services.... For malaria treatment, demand creation focuses on promoting improved testing, prompt and proper use of artemisinin combination therapy (ACT) treatment for individual cases of malaria, and effective home management of fever, together with referrals of severe cases to a higher-level health facility.
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The African Palliative Care Association is pleased to publish the first edition of Palliative Care Standards for Africa. The development of these standards was achieved through wide consultation with service beneficiaries and providers, and they have been developed to suit different levels of ... service delivery, from primary to tertiary. These standards are underpinned by the World Health Organization’s definition of palliative care, and recognise that scaling up palliative care requires a public health approach with four pillars: policy, education, drug availability and implementation. In addition, the increasing need to establish specific indicators of quality and effectiveness for palliative care has been a big driving force behind these comprehensive standards. It is APCA’s wish that they will provide a framework for the development of evaluation
and performance indicators that can facilitate programme improvement and development. The standards are designed to allow the development or improvement of palliative care across the different services levels, within the organisational capacity of various service providers. They describe a relationship between primary, intermediary and tertiary level service providers, with expectations for all providers articulated through detailed criteria for each standard. It is therefore expected that these standards will influence the planning and delivery of palliative care services at all levels of health care service delivery.
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he UNFPA “Programmatic guidelines: Cash and Voucher Assistance in Sexual and Reproductive Health programming in Emergencies” explains how CVA can be effectively integrated into humanitarian responses to help women, girls, and other vulnerable groups access lifesaving and comprehensive SRH servic...es. Rooted in UNFPA’s mandate, this document provides practical direction for designing, implementing, and monitoring CVA within SRH programming.
The guidance highlights the barriers that hinder access to SRH care, such as affordability, availability, acceptability, and appropriateness, and illustrates how CVA can address financial obstacles by covering transport, user fees, or other indirect costs, while reinforcing health system strengthening efforts. CVA is presented as a complementary tool that supports both emergency and long-term SRH goals. Within humanitarian emergencies, it can contribute directly to achieving MISP objectives, including:
Enabling survivors of sexual violence to access clinical and psychosocial care;
Supporting the continuation of HIV and STI treatment, including coverage of transport;
Facilitating safe deliveries and emergency obstetric and newborn care; and
Removing financial barriers to voluntary family planning and contraceptive access, while ensuring informed choice and avoiding coercion.
Beyond the MISP, CVA also supports the transition to comprehensive SRH services in protracted emergencies and recovery phases. Examples include using cash or vouchers to encourage antenatal and postnatal care, ensure menstrual hygiene, sustain cancer prevention and treatment, fund obstetric fistula repair, and promote SRH education among adolescents.
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Malar J (2017) 16:174 DOI 10.1186/s12936-017-1808-x
Background: Since 2004, artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) has been the first-line treatment for uncomplicated malaria in Benin. In 2016, a medicine outlet survey was implemented to investigate the availability, price, and market share of... anti-malarial treatment and malaria diagnostics. Results provide a timely and important benchmark to measure future interventions aimed at increasing access to quality malaria case management services.
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Stock-outs of antimalarials cause unnecessary deaths among an estimated 219 million people afflicted worldwide. Good pharmaceutical information systems can avoid stock-outs with timely, accurate data and high reporting rates that ensure the continuous availability of critically-needed antimalarials....
The US Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Systems for Increased Access to Pharmaceuticals and Services (SIAPS) Program, with support from the US Government’s Presidential Malaria Initiative (PMI), is working with the Government of Guinea to improve the national malaria reporting system. By the end of September 2013, after only a few months of training in all 19 PMI-supported zones, reporting rates had improved significantly, reaching an average completion rate of 85 percent for health facilities during the previous quarter.
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The Lancet, Planetary Health Volume 5, ISSUE 11, e766-e774, November 01, 2021
Increasing human demand for water and changes in water availability due to climate change threatens water security worldwide. Additionally, exploitation of water resources induces stress on freshwater environments, leadi...ng to biodiversity loss and reduced ecosystem services. We aimed to conduct a spatially detailed assessment of global human water stress for low to high environmental flow (EF) protection.
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This document adopts a health determinants framework for examining the evidence related to women’s poor mental health. From this perspective, public policy including economic policy, socio-cultural and environmental factors, community and social support, stressors and life events, personal behavio...ur and skills, and availability and access to health services, are all seen to exercise a role in determining women’s mental health status. Similarly, when considering the differences between women and men, a gender approach has been used. While this does not exclude biological or sex differences, it considers the critical roles that social and cultural factors and unequal power relations between men and women play in promoting or impeding mental health. Such inequalities create, maintain and exacerbate exposure to risk factors that endanger women’s mental health, and are most graphically illustrated in the significantly different rates of depression between men and women, poverty and its impact, and the phenomenal prevalence of violence against women.
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Senegal has adopted the World Health Organization–Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS recommended 90-90-90 targets.5 The adoption of this strategy means that the country is expected, by 2020, to have 90% of its population living with HIV diagnosed, 90% of all those diagnosed receiving susta...ined HIV treatment, and 90% of those receiving antiretroviral therapy having suppressed viral load measures.5 To achieve these outcomes, having good clinical laboratory services for diagnosis and follow-up will be critical.6 More specifically, investments will be needed to improve laboratory infrastructure, and to facilitate the access and availability of routine viral load and early infant diagnosis (EID) measures through the implementation of point-of-care (POC) diagnostic platforms along with an efficient and sustainable quality assurance programme.
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For close to 15 years, the Monitor has tracked the impact of victim assistance on the lives of victims of landmines, cluster munitions,
and other explosive remnants of war (hereafter “mine/ERW victims”). Over this time, the international communi...ty has strengthened its resolve to promote the rights and address the needs of victims through programs and services that are accessible and adequate in quantity, quality, availability, and consistent with the high standards set by human rights as well as other international humanitarian law.
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This publication gives a broad vision of what a comprehensive approach to cervical cancer prevention and control means. In particular, it outlines the complementary strategies for comprehensive cervical cancer prevention and control, and highlights the neners. This new guide updates the 2006 edition... and includes the recent promising deve
ed for collaboration across programmes, organizations and partl-
opments in technologies and strategies that can address the gaps between the needs for and availability of services for cervical cancer prevention and control.
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This Community Health Systems (CHS) Catalog country profile is the 2016 update of a landscape
assessment that was originally conducted by the Advancing Partners & Communities (APC) project
in 2014. The CHS Catalog focuses on 25 countries deemed priority by the United States Agency for
Internation...al Development’s (USAID) Office of Population and Reproductive Health, and includes
specific attention to family planning (FP), a core focus of the APC project.
The update comes as many countries are investing in efforts to support the Sustainable Development
Goals and to achieve universal health coverage while modifying policies and strategies to better align
and scale up their community health systems.
The purpose of the CHS Catalog is to provide the most up-to-date information available on community
health systems based on existing policies and related documentation in the 25 countries. Hence, it does
not necessarily capture the realities of policy implementation or service delivery on the ground. APC
has made efforts to standardize the information across country profiles, however, content between
countries may vary due to the availability and quality of the data obtained from policy documents.
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Hum Resour Health 20, 37 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12960-022-00735-y.
For countries to achieve universal health coverage, they need to have well-functioning and resilient health systems. Achieving this requires a sufficient number of qualified health workers and this necessitates the importa...nce of investments in producing and regulating health workers. It is projected that by 2030, Africa would need additional 6.1 million doctors, nurses, and midwives. However, based on the current trajectory, only 3.1 million would be trained and ready for service delivery. To reduce current shortages of the health workforce, Africa needs to educate and train 3.0 million additional health workers by 2030. This study was conducted to describe the distribution and ownership of the health training institutions, production of health workers, and the availability of accreditation mechanisms for training programmes in the WHO African Region.
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