In April 2020, Gavi and COVAX joined the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) to provide equitable global access to COVID-19 vaccines to tackle the pandemic. In June 2020, the Gavi COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC) was launched to finance equitable access in 92 lower-income countries. Si...nce then, US$ 10 billion has been raised for the AMC to procure vaccines and support delivery. Despite a challenging supply situation, COVAX has now shipped one billion doses to 144 countries, including over 870 million to AMC economies.
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The overall goal of the Kenya Health Sector Referral Strategy is to improve client access to referral. The objectives of the strategy are to realise improved capacity of health providers to identify clients who require referral, develop protocols that will lead to referral system efficiency and effe...ctiveness, and promote and facilitate information and communication technology (ICT) to manage referrals, improve care, enhance capacity of the referral system in Kenya, provide communication and related equipment, and promote research and innovation for referrals.
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There is a crucial need to initiate and sustain fistula programs that increase access and strengthen the capacity of the health care system to provide high quality services for repair and care of women living with female genital fistula. Therefore, it is important to pay particular attention to the ...quality of training, and to proactively determine how this training fits into the health care system. Furthermore, the quality of training is improved by committing adequate resources to ensure competent trainers, able to train and follow-up their trainees. Women with genital fistulae, their families and the community need to have confidence in the health care system. It is therefore necessary to have pro-active discussions about the quality of training with relevant stakeholders. These fistula training guidelines and standards go towards harmonizing the training approach and to improving the quality of training and hence, service delivery.
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These ICRC guidelines outline the organization’s approach to mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) during and after armed conflict and other situations of violence. They provide a framework for harmonizing MHPSS programmes within the organization, and an insight into its strategic process...es and field practices.
This publication is not intended to serve as a training manual for specific MHPSS techniques. In sharing these guidelines with an external audience, the ICRC aims to raise awareness of its approach among professionals and other interested parties.
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It provides guidance on care for use in resource-limited settings or in settings where families with sick young infants do not accept or cannot access referral care, but can be managed in outpatient settings by an appropriately trained health worker. The guideline seeks to provide programmatic guida...nce on the role of CHWs and home visits in identifying signs of serious infections in neonates and young infants.
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This pocket guide is designed for clinicians, including physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals, who will provide emergency care following a radiological event. It should be used as a supplement to training and practice drills. (Prints on 8½" x 14" paper)
This guide is designed to assist UNICEF staff and partners, in establishing and
operating Child Friendly Spaces (CFS) in an emergency. It attempts to provide
readers with the main principles of a CFS and the processes on how to establish
one.
The overall aim is to improve the standards and capac...ity of field staff, by providing
the required knowledge to support the design and operations of child friendly
spaces.
It will facilitate an understanding of how to develop a CFS in contexts in which
children’s well-being are threatened or damaged as a result of conflict or natural
disasters. More specifically, this guide attempts to broaden and strengthen the
knowledge, skills and attitudes of protection officers/field staff so that they are able
to respond to the multi-faceted needs of children.
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Guidance issued as of 25 March 2020
This guidance is intended for use by health authorities to guide the actions taken by health-care providers for refugees and migrants in relation to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. This document is intended to address the needs and rights of refugees a...nd migrants living in all types of setting.
General recommendations made by WHO in the COVID-19 response (link here) are the superseding guidelines. Unfounded measures regarding testing, health screening and quarantine should not be imposed on refugees and migrants.
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Module 1
Clinical
July 2017
Module 1: Clinical. This module is for clinicians, including physicians, nurses and clinical officers. It gives an overview of how to provide PrEP safely and effectively, including: screening for substantial risk of HIV; performing appropriate testing before initi...ating someone on PrEP and while the person is taking PrEP; and how to follow up PrEP users and offer counselling on issues such as adherence.
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Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2010) 365, 2959–2971; doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0143.
Agricultural ecosystems provide humans with food, forage, bioenergy and pharmaceuticals and are essential to human wellbeing. These systems rely on ecosystem services provided by natural ecosystems, including pollination, b...iological pest control, maintenance of soil structure and fertility, nutrient cycling and hydrological services. Preliminary assessments indicate that the value of these ecosystem services to agriculture is enormous and often underappreciated. Agroecosystems also produce a variety of ecosystem services, such as regulation of soil and water quality, carbon sequestration, support for biodiversity and cultural services. Depending on management practices, agriculture can also be the source of numerous disservices, including loss of wildlife habitat, nutrient runoff, sedimentation of waterways, greenhouse gas emissions, and pesticide poisoning of humans and non-target species. The tradeoffs that may occur between provisioning services and other ecosystem services and disservices should be evaluated in terms of spatial scale, temporal scale and reversibility. As more effective methods for valuing ecosystem services become available, the potential for ‘win–win’ scenarios increases. Under all scenarios, appropriate agricultural management practices are critical to realizing the benefits of ecosystem services and reducing disservices from agricultural activities.
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For the purpose of this document, Interprofessional is defined as: Multiple health disciplines with diverse knowledge and skills who share an integrated set of goals and who utilize interdependent collaboration that involves communication, sharing of knowledge and coordination of services to provide... services to patients/clients and their care-giving systems. This best practice guideline, Developing and Sustaining Interprofessional Health Care: Optimizing patients/clients, organizational, and system outcomes is intended to foster healthy work environments. The focus in developing this guideline was identifying attributes of interprofessional care that will optimize quality outcomes for patients/clients, providers, teams, the organization and the system. This guideline identifies best practices to enable, enhance and sustain teamwork and interprofessional collaboration, and to enhance positive outcomes for patients/clients, systems and organizations. It is based on the best available evidence; where evidence was limited, the recommendations were based on the consensus of expert opinion.
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Interim guidance v2, 19 March 2020
This document provides WHO checklists for risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) readiness and initial response for novel coronaviruses (nCoV) recently identified in Wuhan, China (2019-nCoV). The objective of this document is to provide actionable guid...ance for countries to implement effective RCCE strategies which will help protect the public’s health in the early response to nCoV. This document includes recommended RCCE goals and actions for countries preparing for nCoV cases and for countries that have confirmed -nCoV cases.
Available in English, French and Chinese
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To support its R&D activities on Chagas disease, DNDi launched the Chagas Clinical Research Platform (CCRP). The platform brings together partners, experts, and stakeholders to provide support for evaluation and development of new treatments for Chagas disease. The patient-centred platform aims to f...acilitate clinical research, provide a forum for technical discussions, develop a critical mass of expertise, and strengthen institutional research capacities. In addition, it identifies and reviews priority needs, works towards standardization of methodology to assess drug efficacy and reviews alternatives for using current approved drugs (new schemes, doses, combination) and special scenarios (resistance).
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It summarizes guidance on how to manage – and when to refer – children and adolescents presenting with common complaints and conditions. It includes information to enable primary health care providers to coordinate the continued care of children and adolescents with long-term conditions and dise...ases managed by specialists. Preventive and promotive measures from the newborn period to adolescence include advice on the timing and content of well-child visits, the promotion of early childhood development and health messages for adolescents.
This Pocket Book aims to improve the diagnosis and management of common conditions in children and adolescents that can be managed at the outpatient level. It helps to improve the use of laboratory and other diagnostic measures and the rational use of essential drugs and equipment.
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Section 2, Counseling and Communicating with Men, focuses on strengthening service providers' ability to interact with, communicate with, and counsel men—with or without their partners—on reproductive health issues. Topics include counseling and communication approaches, provider biases toward a...nd against men that may need to be addressed, and effective communication and counseling techniques.
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Training Manual
Building on earlier EngenderHealth work in counseling, Counseling for Effective Use of Family Planning responds to an identified gap in existing materials and fills the needs expressed by those in the field. The intended audiences for this curriculum are health care providers, their... supervisors, and the managers of the programs in which they work. The counseling skills addressed here are expected to be relevant to the provision of both preventive and curative health services through the workshop participants’ national health systems. Finally, the curriculum’s participatory approach to defining terms and to generating profiles of potential clients is designed to assist trainees in addressing the realities and exploring the reproductive health priorities of their communities in a culturally appropriate manner.
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The SAMHSA-HRSA Center for Integrated Health Solutions (CIHS) promotes the development of integrated primary and behavioral health services to better address the needs of individuals with mental health and substance use conditions, whether seen in specialty behavioral health or primary care provider... settings. CIHS is funded jointly by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration(SAMHSA) and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), and run by the National Council for Behavioral Health.
Despite the high prevalence of mental health and substance use problems, too many Americans go without treatment — in part because their disorders go undiagnosed. Regular screenings in primary care and other healthcare settings enables earlier identification of mental health and substance use disorders, which translates into earlier care. Screenings should be provided to people of all ages, even the young and the elderly
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Primary health care offers a cost–effective route to achieving universal health coverage (UHC). However, primary health-care systems are weak in many low- and middle-income countries and often fail to provide comprehensive, people-centred, integrated care. We analysed the primar...y health-care systems in 20 low- and middle-income countries using a semi-grounded approach. Options for strengthening primary health-care systems were identified by thematic content analysis. We found that: (i)despite the growing burden of noncommunicable disease, many low- and middle-income countries lacked funds for preventive services; (ii)community health workers were often under-resourced, poorly supported and lacked training; (iii)out-of-pocket expenditure exceeded 40% of total health expenditure in half the countries studied, which affected equity; and (iv)health insurance schemes were hampered by the fragmentation of public and private systems, underfunding, corruption and poor engagement of informal workers. In 14 countries, the private sector was largely unregulated. Moreover, community engagement in primary health care was weak in countries where services were largely privatized. In some countries, decentralization led to the fragmentation of primary health care. Performance improved when financial incentives were linked to regulation and quality improvement, and community involvement was strong. Policy-making should be supported by adequate resources for primary health-care implementation and government spending on primary health care should be increased by at least 1% of gross domestic product. Devising equity-enhancing financing schemes and improving the accountability of primary health-care management is also needed. Support from primary health-care systems is critical for progress towards UHC in the decade to 2030.
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It provides guidance on care for use in resource-limited settings or in settings where families with sick young infants do not accept or cannot access referral care, but can be managed in outpatient settings by an appropriately trained health worker. The guideline seeks to provide programmatic guida...nce on the role of CHWs and home visits in identifying signs of serious infections in neonates and young infants.
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Pharmaceutical regulators are at the forefront of ensuring that only safe and effective medicines are authorized and available in the market. This document builds on the recommendations in the above publication and has been prepared to specifically assist national medicines regulatory authorities to... understand the nature and extent of oxytocin quality issues and to provide key technical information and quality requirements for oxytocin products in dossier assessments. Furthermore, this document also presents recommendations on other regulatory actions needed to ensure that only quality-assured oxytocin products are authorized and made available to women.
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