The Councils share a common mandate of ensuring persons practising health related professions in Namibia are suitably qualified. Registration with the Councils is, thus, a pre-requisite for professional practice – and it is also a legal requirement too update personal details of all registered hea...lthcare practitioners. The target of the Councils as per the five-year strategic plan (2020/2025) is to register and enrol twenty-four thousand six hundred and fourteen (24 614) healthcare practitioners by the 2021/2022 financial year. The Councils have significantly delivered on this mandate by registering and enrolling a total of twenty-six thousand six hundred and eighty-one (26 681) healthcare practitioners.
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The role of evidence in the journey towards universal health coverage is paramount. Financial risk protection monitoring, the major focus of this report, informs where the WHO African Region stands in reducing the financial hardship people face due to health expenses. This report details the status ...of financial risk protection and related trends, the drivers of out-of-pocket (OOP) payments and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on financial risk protection. As such, it provides evidence coutries can draw on to develop health financing systems and reforms that mitigate financial barriers to accessing health services. Through analysis of country data, cross-country learning and drawing on the published literature, this report proposes recommendations that countries may adapt to their contexts.
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The Council was established in late 2020 by Dr Tedros Adhanom
Ghebreyesus (Director-General, WHO) to provide new economic thinking – reassessing how health and wellbeing are valued, produced and distributed across the economy. An all-female group of 10 distinguished economists and area experts, t...he Council has focused on reimagining how to put Health for All at the heart of government decision-making and private sector collaboration at regional, national and international levels.
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In 2022, Namibia had an estimated population of 2.6 million people, where 51 per cent per cent are females and 52.5 per cent of households in urban areas, with fast-growing urban informal settlements which lack access to basic services. Namibia has a young population; 42 per cent are children (0-17 ... years), 13 per cent are under-five, per cent and 19 per cent are aged 15 to 24 years. With the right investment on children and youth, this represents an opportunity for a demographic dividend.
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Tuberculosis (TB) is among the top ten most common causes of death globally and as a single infectious disease it top among infectious diseases. Furthermore, it is noted as the top causes of death among people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Despite recent decreases in the numb...er of notified cases, Namibia still has a high TB burden and is included among the top 30 high-burden TB countries by the World Health Organisation (WHO). In the 2018 Global TB Report, the estimated incidence rate of TB in Namibia was 423/100,000. The same report estimated that 60 people per 100,000 populations died of TB in Namibia, which is a concern, for a disease that is curable and preventable.
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PLOS Glob Public Health 3(7): e0001132. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.
pgph.0001132
This paper proposes a framework for strategic communications for malaria governance that involves five key elements: knowing the audience, defining the message, designing a medium, identifying a messenger, and ...selecting the timing
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4th edition, Reference Manual
The framework recommends expanded coverage of malaria diagnostic and treatment services, intensified vector control to drive down transmission, strengthened malaria surveillance, and increased transborder collaboration, especially in terms of efforts to control the sale and use of artemisinin monoth...erapies. Since it is unlikely that national malaria control programs will be able to implement all the activities described in this framework simultaneously, a list of suggested priority activities has been included in the Annex.
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The National Strategic Plan on Malaria Prevention and Elimination Period 2021 – 2025 seeks to build on the previous national successes of the National Institute of Malariology, Parasitology, and Entomology (NIMPE) while addressing current challenges to reduce the overall burden of malaria in the S...outhern and Central provinces and to initiate elimination activities in remaining focal areas of transmission throughout the country. The overall targets proposed to be reached by 2025 are:
Reduce malaria morbidity rate to below 0.015/1,000 population
Reduce malaria mortality rate to below 0.002/100,000 population
Eliminate malaria in 55 provinces
Ensure no malaria outbreaks
To address the urgent threat of drug resistance, Viet Nam has committed to accelerate efforts to eliminate locally-acquired P. falciparum by 2023.
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WHO today released its first roadmap to tackle postpartum haemorrhage (PPH) – defined as excessive bleeding after childbirth - which affects millions of women annually and is the world’s leading cause of maternal deaths.
Despite being preventable and treatable, PPH results in around 70 000 de...aths every year. For those who survive, it can cause disabilities and psychological trauma that last for years.
“Severe bleeding in childbirth is one of the most common causes of maternal mortality, yet it is highly preventable and treatable,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “This new roadmap charts a path forward to a world in which more women have a safe birth and a healthy future with their families.”
The Roadmap aims to help countries address stark differences in survival outcomes from PPH, which reflect major inequities in access to essential health services. Over 85% of deaths from PPH happen in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Risk factors include anaemia, placental abnormalities, and other complications in pregnancy such as infections and pre-eclampsia.
Many risk factors can be managed if there is quality antenatal care, including access to ultrasound, alongside effective monitoring in the hours after birth. If bleeding starts, it also needs to be detected and treated extremely quickly. Too often, however, health facilities lack necessary healthcare workers or resources, including lifesaving commodities such as oxytocin, tranexamic acid or blood for transfusions.
“Addressing postpartum haemorrhage needs a multipronged approach focusing on both prevention and response - preventing risk factors and providing immediate access to treatments when needed - alongside broader efforts to strengthen women’s rights,” said Dr Pascale Allotey, WHO Director for Sexual and Reproductive Health and HRP, the UN’s special programme on research development and training in human reproduction. “Every woman, no matter where she lives, should have access to timely, high quality maternity care, with trained health workers, essential equipment and shelves stocked with appropriate and effective commodities – this is crucial for treating postpartum bleeding and reducing maternal deaths.”
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Parasites & Vectors volume 11, Article number: 264 (2018)
Dengue creates a staggering epidemiological and economic burden for endemic countries. Without a specific therapy and with a commercial vaccine that presents some problems relative to its full effectiveness, initiatives to improve vector... control strategies, early disease diagnostics and the development of vaccines and antiviral drugs are priorities. In this study, we present the probable origins of dengue in America and the trajectories of its spread. Overall, dengue diagnostics are costly, making the monitoring of dengue epidemiology more difficult and affecting physicians’ therapeutic decisions regarding dengue patients, especially in developing countries. This review also highlights some recent and important findings regarding dengue in Brazil and the Americas. We also summarize the existing DENV polymerase chain reaction (PCR) diagnostic tests to provide an improved reference since these tests are useful and accurate at discriminating DENV from other flaviviruses that co-circulate in the Americas. Additionally, these DENV PCR assays ensure virus serotyping, enabling epidemiologic monitoring.
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Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2014, 3:42
http://www.idpjournal.com/content/3/1/42
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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By almost any measure, human health is better now than at any time in history. Life expectancy has soared from 47 years in 1950–1955, to 69 years in 2005–2010, and death rates in children younger than 5 years of age have decreased substantially, from 214 per thousand live births in 1950–1955, ...to 59 in 2005–2010. But these gains in human health have come at a high price: the degradation of nature’s ecological systems on a scale never seen in human history. A growing body of evidence shows that the health of humanity is intrinsically linked to the health of the environment, but by its actions humanity now threatens to destabilise the Earth’s key life-support systems.
As a Commission, we conclude that the continuing degradation of natural systems threatens to reverse the health gains seen over the last century. In short, we have mortgaged the health of future generations to realise economic and development gains in the present.
Despite present limitations, the Sustainable Development Goals provide a great opportunity to integrate health and sustainability through the judicious selection of relevant indicators relevant to human wellbeing, the enabling infrastructure for development, and the supporting natural systems, together with the need for strong governance.
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Barbados currently has a rudimentary framework and capacity to address the issue of antimicrobial resistance. There however needs to be coordination of efforts and improvement in areas where gaps have been identified.Actions required include improved antibiotic stewardship in healthcare settings, pr...evention of the spread of drug-resistant organisms//bacteria, elimination of the use of medically-important antibiotics for growth promotion in food animals, and expanded surveillance for drug-resistant bacteria in humans and animals.
The National Action Plan will provide the roadmap to guide Barbados in the effort to address the urgent and serious threat of AMR and will be organized around three goals for collaborative action.
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Through public-private partnerships, the government of Rwanda can make more efficient use of public resources by targeting and meeting the needs of specific populations and thus help ensure family planning services and products will be available to all Rwandans in the long term. This report aims to ...inform stakeholders working to strengthen family planning through multisectoral partnerships about Rwanda’s family market.
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