This handbook is intended primarily for front-line health care providers who are likely to see children (among other clients) in their day-to-day practice. These may include general practitioners, nurses, midwives, gynaecologists,
paediatricians, mental health professionals, first responders and st...aff in emergency care.
Other professionals who may find it useful include social workers, those working in social welfare institutions, providers of psychosocial support, and those working in child care facilities and the education system.
Further, the content will benefit the work of policy-makers and managers to enable and support provision of clinical care to children experiencing, or who have experienced, child maltreatment.
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The Vienna Declaration was signed at the end of the Fifth High-level Meeting on Transport, Health and Environment. The virtual meeting, hosted by the Federal Government of Austria, brought together 46 ministers and representatives of 56 countries in the pan-European region.
The group discussed ho...w to introduce substantial changes in transport and mobility systems in order to address multiple challenges such as ambient air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, physical inactivity and noncommunicable diseases, and social inequity in access to transport and mobility.
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The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shown that public financial management (PFM) should be an integral part of the response. Effectiveness in financing the health response depends not only on the level of funding but also on the way public funds are allocated and spent, this is determined by the PFM r...ules, and how money flows to health service providers. So far, early assessments have shown that PFM systems ranged from being a fundamental enabler to acting as a roadblock in the COVID-19 health response. While service delivery mechanisms have been extensively documented throughout the pandemic, the underlying PFM mechanisms of the response also merit attention. To highlight the importance of PFM in health emergency contexts, this rapid review analyses various country PFM experiences and identifies early lessons emerging from the financing of the health response to COVID-19. The assessment is done by stages of the budget cycle: budget allocation, budget execution, and budget oversight. Identifying lessons from the varying PFM modalities used to finance the response to COVID-19 is fundamental both for health policy-makers and for finance authorities to prepare for future health emergencies.
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To survive and thrive, children and adolescents need good health, adequate nutrition, security, safety and a supportive clean environment, opportunities for early learning and education, responsive relationships and connectedness, and opportunities for personal autonomy and self-realization. To prom...ote 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
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Climate change is resulting in poorer health outcomes, increasing mortality and is a driver of health inequities. However, health is well placed to be a significant part of the solution; the positive health impacts from stronger climate change action can motivate stronger global ambition; health sys...tems which are resilient to climate change can help protect their populations from the negative impacts (in the short and longer terms); and sustainable low carbon health systems can make a substantial contribution to reducing national and global emissions.
This fact sheet on climate change and health is part of the Climate Fast Facts series of the United Nations Climate Action team.
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For the past years, Haiti has been engulfed in a socioeconomic, political, and humanitarian crisis that has reached critical levels since mid-September 2022 with the intensification of gang violence and social unrest. The widespread insecurity and
political instability have drastically affected the... country’s access to essential goods and services, including food, water, and health. The current fuel supply crisis has affected the water and electricity supply to the population, health centers, and hospitals. Due to problems of insecurity and violence, patients and health personnel have difficulty accessing hospitals and health services.
In parallel, the public health system and international partners face limited response capacity due to reduced international personnel in Haiti, logistics issues, and difficulties in importing supplies. Indeed insecurity, roadblocks, and lockdowns are affecting the importation of internationally procured goods, which may slow the arrival of essential lifesaving supplies to support cholera response efforts. This scenario is particularly problematic, as cholera recently resurfaced in early October.
Armed gangs now control over 60% of the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince, affecting at least 1.5 million people, and have expanded their influence outside of the capital city, interrupting vital humanitarian programs in most of the national territory,
including COVID-19 vaccination campaigns.
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Worldwide, more people are on the move now than ever before, yet many refugees and migrants face poorer health outcomes than the host populations. Addressing their health needs is, therefore, a global health priority and integral to the principle of the right to health for all. The key is to strengt...hen and maintain health systems by ensuring that they are refugee- and migrant-sensitive and inclusive.
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Ethiopia faces unprecedented public health risks with over 17.4 million people in need of health assistance due to a compounded security, epidemiological, environmental and socio-economic hardships throughout the country. Specifically, the prolonged drought and localized conflicts have negatively im...pacted public health systems, whose access has become severely hindered because of physical constraints, infrastructure, equipment damages, lack of available healthcare workforce and negative coping mechanisms resulting from livelihoods deterioration. Whereas the World Health Organization (WHO) assistance has been critical to coordinate humanitarian efforts in affected areas, additional efforts are required in the coming months to address ongoing epidemic outbreaks and support the recovery process in conflict-affected areas (Afar, Amhara, Tigray and Gambelia) that are now accessible.
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With the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing energy and cost-of-living crises, many OECD countries have had to face significant economic and societal challenges over the last five years. The succession of crises has had important implications for health systems and the available resources allocated to... health. This policy brief examines the recent trends in health spending and discusses what is driving the latest spending trajectory.
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The Guidelines on promotive and preventive mental health interventions for adolescents - Helping Adolescents thrive (HAT), provide evidence-informed recommendations on psychosocial interventions to promote mental health, prevent mental disorders, and reduce self-harm and other risk behaviours among ...adolescents.
The HAT Guidelines aims to inform policy development, service planning and the strengthening of health and education systems, and facilitate mainstreaming of adolescent mental health promotion and prevention strategies across sectors and delivery platforms.
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The region of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has high levels of income inequality and urbanization. This leaves a large percentage of the population exposed and vulnerable to infectious disease outbreaks (1). The COVID-19 outbreak occurred suddenly, within a complex economic, social and polit...ical context and at a time of low economic growth and high levels of informal labour. Structural challenges of poverty, deep inequality across different dimensions, and weak health and social protection systems exacerbated the region’s vulnerability to the pandemic
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In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), one maternal death was registered every hour in 2020. That same year, the trend in the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) for the Region of the Americas regressed alarmingly and unprecedentedly to the levels seen two decades ago. In addition to indicating a wors...ening of health outcomes, these figures also signal a deepening of inequalities, representing thousands of individual, unacceptable tragedies that in most cases could have been preventable. Maternal death is the result of a multifactorial process in which structural elements such as the economic system, environmental conditions, and culture interact. Other factors related to social inequality are also present, such as racism, poverty, gender inequality, and lack of access to the education system. The current situation calls for urgent mobilization of the health systems of LAC countries in order to strengthen efforts to combat maternal mortality, especially in countries that are still far from achieving the SHAA2030 regional target. For this reason, a preventive, health-promoting, life-course-based approach is needed, with models of care centered on women, families, and the community Scientific evidence shows that health systems with a solid foundation in primary health care (PHC) achieve better outcomes, greater equity, and reduced health expenditures. To address this, PAHO proposes a strategy, aimed primarily at women who are in the most vulnerable situation, who are the ones who represent the greatest burden of maternal mortality, to accelerate the reduction of maternal mortality in the Region of the Americas, based on the expansion and strengthening of PHC.
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Ukraine has four operational nuclear power plants (NPPs) containing 15 nuclear reactors, as well as two research nuclear reactors, radioactive waste disposal facilities, radioactive sources used in medicine and industry, and Chernobyl NPP that was decommissioned after the 1986 accident but still hos...ts two storages for an old spent nuclear fuel units.
Artillery shelling and fires may damage the safety systems and critical supply services of those installations. The State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine (SNRIU) has been providing daily updates to the IAEA and the global community on the situation related to the nuclear installations in Ukraine.
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The health of humans, animals and environment is vitally interlinked. A majority of emerging and endemic
human diseases have their origins in animals, be they transmitted directly, through food or the environment.
The World Health Organization (WHO), the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH,... founded as OIE) and
the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations are the main international organizations
responsible for proposing references and guidance for the public health, agriculture and animal health sectors
respectively. WHO, FAO, WOAH has been an active promoter and implementer of an intersectoral collaborative
approach between institutions and systems to prevent, detect, and control diseases among animals and
humans.
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The evaluation covers the period January 2020 to August 2023. The geographical scope of the evaluation has involved the three levels of WHO (global, regional and country levels) and external key partners. The programmatic evaluation scope was concerned with assessing the SP-PHC in the following area...s/evaluation criteria: relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, added value, sustainability and equity, gender and human rights considerations. The evaluation did not assess the Universal Health Coverage Partnership (UHC-P) as it has its own separate governing body and reviews/evaluations, but instead considered how the SP-PHC had enhanced the value of the UHC-P and vice versa. The resilience and essential public health functions (REPHF) team and Systems’ Governance and Stewardship (SGS) were also not within the scope of this evaluation. However, these workstreams were considered in the wider conclusions and recommendations for the SP-PHC, as appropriate. Finally, the evaluation was focused on the SP-PHC; its scope did not include assessing the configuration and capacity of WHO’s departments and functions as they relate to UHC and health systems.
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This is the fifth report of the Global Evidence Review on Health and Migration (GEHM) series. The publication focuses on the mental health needs of refugees and migrants by providing an overview of the available evidence on patterns of risk and protective factors and of facilitators and barriers to ...care at all levels (individual, family, community and national government). It identifies five high-level themes, each of which has implications for research and policy and is relevant across refugee and migrant groups, contexts and stages of the migration process: self-identity and community support; basic needs and security; cultural concepts of mental health as well as stigma; exposure to adversity and potentially traumatic events; navigating mental health and other systems and services.
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This document provides countries with recommendations for structuring a public health entomology laboratory network. The document will help countries to identify their areas of need and determine how the entomology network can be strengthened, especially in the context of a decentralized health syst...em. The recommendations also consider the different degrees of development and different entomological research needed to support disease prevention and control activities.
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Ethiopia has been repeatedly affected by conflict, flooding, drought, and disease outbreaks in the past years. As of January 2024, the country is actively responding to the longest recorded cholera outbreak which started in August 2022, recurrent measles outbreaks which started in August 2021, and t...he highest number of malaria cases reported since 2017. The El Niño phenomenon is expected to cause further havoc up to July 2024, by causing drought in some parts of the country, and flooding in others. Food insecurity due to lost harvest and livestock is aggravating already high malnutrition rates, negatively impacting morbidity and mortality.
The Health Cluster is closely collaborating with the Ministry of Health (MOH) to prepare for, prevent, and respond to public health emergencies by mobilizing resources to enable health partners to provide life-saving health services to vulnerable populations.
In an environment with ever-increasing needs and decreased funding, the below priorities for 2024 and 2025 have been identified: 1 Strengthen advocacy for longer-term, development funding to address root causes of recurrent disease outbreaks, including through the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus 2 Advocate for increased access to quality health services, with a strong focus on:
sexual and reproductive health services (including for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence)
inclusion of people with disabilities, older people, and people living with HIV
remote populations through inclusion of Mobile Health Teams (MHT) as part of the health system 3 Standardize health services provided by Health Cluster partners through the implementation of Essential Health Care packages, aligned with existing MOH guidance, aimed at ensuring quality service delivery for affected populations, especially at community level 4 Strengthen quality of, and access to data for needs analysis and informed decision-making 5 Strengthen subnational coordination, with increased focus on zones and local health partners
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The World Health Organization (WHO) is releasing the second edition of its Global Accelerated Action for the Health of Adolescents (AA-HA!) guidance. The document aims to equip governments to respond to the health and well-being challenges, opportunities and needs of adolescents.
The guidance pro...vides the latest available data on adolescent health and well-being. It also outlines an updated list of core indicators that data should be collected on. Globally, road injury was the top cause of death for adolescent males in 2019. Among female adolescents, the leading causes of death were diarrhoeal diseases among the younger group (10-14 years) and tuberculosis (TB) in the older group (15-19 years).
Over the last 20 years, mortality rates have declined among adolescents globally, with the largest decline in older (15–19 years) adolescent girls. For non-fatal diseases, the burden has not improved over the past two decades, with the main causes of ill health in this category being: mental health conditions (depressive and anxiety disorders, childhood behavioural disorders), iron deficiency anaemia, skin diseases and migraine.
Adolescent well-being depends on a range of factors, including healthy food, education, life skills and employability, connectedness, feeling valued by society, safe and supportive environments, resilience, and the freedom to make choices. To take an appropriately holistic approach, the guidance outlines how to take crosscutting action to support adolescent health and well-being, with mutually reinforcing interventions across sectors, such as health, education, social protection, and telecommunications. Targeted efforts are also required to engage adolescents, as they trust health systems less than adults do and are especially vulnerable to modern-day trends, like online bullying and gaming.
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The world is facing an unprecedented range of emergencies. In reaction to these complex adversities, many people experience considerable distress and impairment, and a minority may even go on to develop mental health conditions. Meanwhile, those with pre-existing mental health conditions may experie...nce a worsening of their condition and are at risk of neglect, abandonment, abuse and lack of access to support. Unfortunately, evidence-based mental health care is often extremely limited in humanitarian settings. In response, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) published the Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) Humanitarian Intervention Guide (mhGAP-HIG) in 2015. This practical tool supports health-care providers in assessing and offering first-line management of mental, neurological and substance use (MNS) conditions in humanitarian emergency settings.
2 December 2021. The current report, Stories of change from four countries: Building capacity for integrating mental health care within health services across humanitarian settings, describes efforts in four countries to build evidence-based mental health systems in humanitarian emergency settings using the mhGAP-HIG. This report includes three sections, the first describing the importance of scaling up mental health care in emergency contexts, the second outlining case studies (“stories of change”) to scale up the Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) programme in four settings and the third describing lessons learned by stakeholders.
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