This handbook is designed to provide essential information as well as quick tips to improve foot care for people with dark skin tone living with diabetes.
This guidance covers different options for banning or phasing out a pesticide and suggests related risk reduction measures to be taken during the phase-out period. A key focus of this guidance is how to take action to manage, prevent, minimize, and communicate about identified risks during the imple...mentation of a phase-out strategy. It contains a description of legal aspects to consider when phasing out a product and illustrates how a risk communication plan can be structured and implemented. How different stakeholders may be involved when a pesticide is going to be phased out is also described.
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This document highlights the latest WHO recommendations designed to optimize health outcomes, streamline delivery and address persistent barriers to prevention and care. It especially focuses on people often left behind in service delivery, including adolescents and young people, key populations and... people with advanced HIV disease. The guidance emphasizes integration, simplification, choice and equity.
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This publication provides guidance for planning country-specific programming to achieve the triple elimination of mother-to-child (or vertical) transmission of HIV, syphilis and hepatitis B virus. It is based on the WHO Triple Elimination Framework, which promotes an integrated, person-centred appro...ach to efficiently and holistically prevent transmission of these infections from mothers to their infants along four pillars.
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National tuberculosis (TB) prevalence surveys provide a nationally representative measurement of the burden of TB disease in the population, at a given point in time. Repeat surveys allow assessment of trends and tracking of progress towards national and global targets for reductions in TB disease b...urden. Survey data also provide important insights that can help national TB programmes to identify ways to improve TB diagnosis and treatment.
National TB prevalence surveys are relevant in countries that do not yet have national disease notification and vital registration systems that are of sufficiently high quality and coverage to allow reliable tracking of TB disease burden.
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The document "Combating False Information on Vaccines: A Guide for EPI Managers" is designed to help Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) managers address vaccine misinformation. It begins by defining misinformation and explaining why it spreads rapidly, often due to its emotional appeal and simpl...istic explanations. The guide identifies common sources of vaccine misinformation, including influential individuals who profit from spreading false information. The document outlines strategies for combating misinformation, emphasizing the importance of EPI managers as trusted sources. It provides tips for identifying misinformation online, such as checking URLs, dates, and author credentials, and recognizing tactics like evoking strong emotions or pushing conspiracy theories. Two main approaches to fighting misinformation are discussed: prebunking and debunking. Prebunking involves warning individuals about potential misinformation before they encounter it, while debunking aims to correct false information after it has been consumed. The guide offers practical examples for both methods. Additionally, the document highlights the role of EPI managers in supporting health workers to trust immunization. It suggests being kind, nonjudgmental, and transparent when addressing concerns, and using motivational interviewing techniques to understand and respond to health workers' doubts. The guide also emphasizes the importance of creating a supportive environment for health workers, promoting pro-vaccine norms, and providing continuing education on vaccines. Overall, the guide aims to help EPI managers maintain trust in vaccines and provides comprehensive strategies to identify, address, and prevent the spread of vaccine misinformation in clinical and community settings. This document is necessary to equip EPI managers with the knowledge and tools to combat vaccine misinformation, support their teams, and promote trust in vaccines, ultimately protecting public health.
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Access to safe, effective and quality-assured health products and technologies is crucial for achieving universal health coverage and primary health care goals. The continued growth of the aging population; increasing burden of noncommunicable diseases; growing burden of mental health issues; climat...e change; shifting patterns of vector borne diseases, fungal disease and waterborne diseases; antimicrobial resistance; and new infectious hazards create an ongoing need for equitable access to safe, effective and quality-assured health products and technologies, and renewed investments in research and development for innovative health products and technologies.
The coronavirus pandemic exposed the inequalities in access to health products, highlighting the need for longer-term strategies to strengthen access to health products and technologies outside of and in emergency situations. While technological and scientific advances present an opportunity to increase access to health products and technologies, the risk of increasing inequality due to higher prices for new health products and technologies; the persisting problem of substandard and falsified medical products; a lack of skilled workforce in many low- and middle-income countries; and a lack of data for decisionmaking and for measuring progress present significant challenges.
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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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Despite being a preventable and curable infectious disease, tuberculosis (TB) has continued to elude global controll efforts. In 2023, 8.2 milion people with TB were diagnosed and notified to the WHO, the hightest number ever reported since WHO began tracking.
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.
Effective surveillance and monitoring of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and their risk factors are essential for informing evidence-based public health policies, addressing health inequities, and ensuring progress toward global and regional targets. By tracking trends in NCDs, their modifiable risk... factors such as tobacco use, unhealthy diets, physical inactivity, harmful use of alcohol, and air pollution, along with biological risk factors such as overweight and obesity, high blood pressure (hypertension), and elevated blood glucose (diabetes), policymakers can identify emerging threats, target vulnerable populations, allocating resources efficiently. Reliable data also enable countries to evaluate interventions, adjust policies, and strengthen health systems to reduce the burden of NCDs.
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The objective of this guideline is to present the complete set of all WHO recommendations and best practice statements relating to abortion. While legal, regulatory, policy and service-delivery contexts may vary from country to country, the recommendations and best practices described in this docume...nt aim to enable evidence-based decision-making with respect to quality abortion care.
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The annual bulletin of the Mekong Malaria Elimination (MME) programme is a yearly report that reviews ongoing efforts to combat multidrug resistance and eliminate malaria in the 6 countries of the Greater Mekong subregion (GMS): Cambodia, China (Yunnan province), Lao People's Democratic Republic, My...anmar, Thailand and Viet Nam.
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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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To guide the provision of quality palliative care services across the African region, the African Palliative Care Association (APCA) has developed a framework of core palliative care competencies that can be used by service providers, educators and other stakeholders to guide programmes development.
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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The Guidelines for the Use of the APCA African Palliative Outcome Scale (POS) has been developed by the APCA, in collaboration with
stakeholders, to help appropriately trained health practitioners and researchers across the region to utilise the APCA African POS in their work place (Powell et... al, 2007; Warria et al, 2007). Not only do the guidelines provide a clear rationale for measuring palliative care outcomes, but they also outline practical information on how to use the tool to collect data and analyse its results. So why is there a need for these guidelines?
Palliative care as a concept and discipline is not well understood across Africa, and its development is still embryonic in many countries. While there are many obstacles that hinder palliative care development on the continent, a key challenge is the lack of accurate information about the palliative care being provided and its outcomes. The APCA African POS is a useful tool to help us measure these outcomes and, given that
measuring palliative care outcomes remains a relatively new concept, it is important to guide people on how to use the tool. Of course, these guidelines are not intended to address everything related to the measurement of palliative care outcomes; they contain only essential information for providers. More detailed information on the use of outcome tools, and in particular within the research setting, can be gained from contacting relevantly trained professionals.
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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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