The Training Toolkit for Community Early Warning Systems is an operational manual that aims to strengthen early warning systems in a developing country context. It accompanies and should put into practice the guiding strategic principles found in the Community Early Warning Systems: Guiding Principl...es.
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Growing emergencies and displacements across the world demand increasingly complex interventions and responses. The World Health Organization (WHO) has developed Malaria control in emergencies: a field manual to provide technical guidance to help partners respond effectively to malaria in emergency ...situations. This field manual supersedes the 2013 WHO handbook.
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Breastfeeding is a cornerstone of healthy infant nutrition, development and survival. It is critical for countries* to improve breastfeeding rates in order to achieve global targets for newborn and child health and survival, as well as economic growth and environmental sustainability
Exposure to air pollution has significant adverse health effects, leading to nearly 1 in every 8 deaths globally. Air pollution affects all age groups, from unborn children to older people, in both high- and low-income nations.
Early Adolescent Skills for Emotions (EASE) is an evidence-based group psychological intervention to help 10–15-year-olds affected by internalizing problems (e.g. stress and symptoms of anxiety, depression) in communities exposed to adversity. Published by the World Health Organization (WHO) and U...nited Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), EASE aims to support adolescents and their caregivers with skills to reduce distress. The EASE training manual accompanies the EASE intervention manual and is designed to be used to train EASE helpers (those who deliver the EASE intervention to adolescents and caregivers) and EASE trainers/supervisors (those who will go on to train/supervise future EASE helpers).
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This guidance synthesizes current evidence on dengue laboratory testing and diagnostics and provides practical recommendations for laboratories, clinicians, public health officials, and programme managers involved in dengue diagnosis, surveillance, and control, in the context of the global emergency.... It includes a diagnostic algorithm for suspected cases, outlining appropriate testing methods based on days post symptom onset.
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This resulting toolkit is a practical guide intended to assist users to become advocates for palliative care in a practical and effective
way. It is not necessarily a resource to read from cover to cover; rather, it can also be used selectively to each reader’s needs to engage audiences and... ensure that there is a real understanding of the need for palliative care. It should also be read in conjunction with the supplementary resources listed at the end of each of the toolkit’s sections.
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For education to be competency-based and effective, appropriate training methodologies have to be used to support the learner to have the appropriate knowledge and to translate this knowledge into skills and competencies. Such education and training should lead to a change in attitudes, beliefs a...nd values, thus making the palliative care graduate able to do their job very effectively. To that end, APCA has developed this new resource, which is a guide to effective teaching methodologies in palliative care, targeting educators and trainers across Africa. This guide has been developed to enable educators and trainers to acquire knowledge and skills for using effective, practical, participatory and experiential teaching methods, and to use these in extending learning to all health care providers in Africa. The methods presented in this guide are based on existing practical and documented evidence of effective palliative care education.
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In the absence of a such a measure, and building on the success of developing the APCA African
Palliative Outcome Scale (POS) for adults, the African Palliative Care Association has developed the
APCA African Children’s POS. The tool has been validated across diseases, countries, settings and ...
languages and used in both quality improvement and research studies. Moreover, feedback on the
tool from doctors and nurses who have used it has been very supportive, with providers perceiving
it as an easy-to-use instrument that helps them undertake holistic assessments that in part entail
discussing difficult issues.
This booklet is a practical guide intended to help users employ the APCA African POS correctly.
Following a discussion of the origins and background to the APCA African PPOS, the guide discusses
the measurement of outcomes, the development of the tool and its use (including the analysis of
collected data), before finishing with illustrative examples of the use of the questionnaire.
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This report synthesizes the state of knowledge on the interlinkages between environmental degradation climate change conflict and mobility in the East and Horn of Africa, focusing on Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda.
This document outlines the plan for a continental cholera prevention and control with the implementation framework for the Cholera IMST, detailing its governance structure, strategic priorities, and operational modalities
On 13 August 2024, the Africa Centres for Disease Control (Africa CDC) declared the multi-country mpox outbreak a public health emergency of continental security, with strong recommendations to improve surveillance and vaccine deployment in all AU Member States. On 14 August 2024, the WHO Director-G...eneral declared mpox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).
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Access to medicines is essential for attainment of universal health coverage, which is central to achievement of the health-related Sustainable Development Goals. Controlled medicines include those such as opioids, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, amphetamines and others with identified or emergent cl...inical indications. WHO recognizes that these medicines are necessary for pre- and post-operative care, for sedation, for the management of both acute and chronic pain, for palliative care, as anticonvulsants (anti-epileptics), for the management of anxiety disorders and for the management of substance use disorders, including as opioid agonist therapy (OAT).
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Updated guidance on the integration of diabetes, hypertension and mental health services, and interventions to support adherence to antiretroviral therapy. The guideline offers practical implementation guidance for countries and key stakeholders as well as outlining key research gaps. As life expec...tancy for people living with HIV continues to increase, managing noncommunicable diseases, mental health, and adherence to antiretroviral therapy is essential to sustaining treatment success, quality of life, and engagement in care. A life course approach addresses these needs from childhood through older age. Service integration supports more person-centred, coordinated care across the life course.
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Lesotho’s Social and Behaviour Change Communication Strategy is a strategic response to the high levels of HIV and TB prevalence in the country that are exacerbated by the persistence of structural and sio-economic difficulties, such as poverty, unemployment, gender inequality and more. This strat...egy aims to address these issues.
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20 YEARS OF STRATEGIC HIV AND PUBLIC HEALTH DATA . beThe completion of the 6th South African National HIV Prevalence, Incidence and Behaviour Survey (SABSSM) report, coincides with the celebration of 30 years of democracy in South Africa; and marks 20 years of conducting nationally representative ho...usehold-based surveys by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), its collaborators and donors. Since its inception in 2002, the SABSSM series has emerged as one of the HSRC’s leading scientific contributions to the country’s HIV and AIDS response (1), providing essential data to monitor the HIV epidemic, the impact of the HIV program in South Africa, and to inform strategies for epidemic control in the National Strategic Plan for HIV, TB and STIs (NSP), now in its fifth edition. Using scientific evidence from SABSSM and other key sources, the NSP guides the country’s response, under the leadership of the South African AIDS Council (SANAC) and the National Department of Health (NDoH), with focus on equitable access to biomedical interventions, addressing the structural and social behavioural drivers of the epidemic, and targeting populations disproportionately affected by HIV; such as, black Africans, key populations and adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) aged 15–24 years (2).
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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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PHSM are vital in reducing the risk and scale of infectious disease transmission and lowering hospitalization and deaths. Examples include contact tracing, quarantine and isolation, mask use, ventilation, school or workplace measures, mobility restrictions and travel requirements.
While these mea...sures are essential, decision-making on PHSM becomes particularly complex during rapidly evolving health emergencies, with incomplete information and under significant public and political pressure, especially when the pathogen is novel or poorly understood. In such contexts, guidance needs to be agile and responsive, developed and adapted based on emerging evidence and shifting epidemiological patterns. Decision-makers are frequently confronted with difficult trade-offs, having to balance measures that are:
─ effective but socially disruptive;
─ cost-effective but logistically burdensome;
─ beneficial for public health but economically disruptive; or
─ practical but inequitable or unethical
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The WHO handbook “Epidemiological Data Analysis for the Early Warning Alert and Response Network (EWARN) in Humanitarian Emergencies” explains how to collect, analyse, interpret, and share health data during crises such as conflicts or natural disasters. It is a practical guide for health and su...rveillance officers to detect disease outbreaks early and guide quick public health responses. The document outlines steps for managing data at different levels (local, regional, national), analysing disease trends by time, place, and person, and using indicators to monitor outbreak risks. It also provides methods for interpreting and communicating results clearly to decision-makers to support effective health interventions in emergencies.
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This brief report summarizes recent information on HIV drug resistance (HIVDR) in the era of integrase-strand transfer inhibitors (INSTI) for HIV prevention and treatment.