Ghana is attracting global attention for efforts to provide health insurance to all citizens through the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). With the program’s strong emphasis on maternal and child health, an expectation of the program is that members will have increased use of relevant servi...ces. The NHIS does appear to enable pregnant women to access services and allow caregivers to seek care early for sick children, but both the quantitative and qualitative assessments also indicated that the poor and least educated were less likely to have insurance than their wealthier and more educated counterparts.
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The response to a cholera outbreak must focus on limiting mortality and reducing the spread of the disease. It should be comprehensive and multisectoral, including epidemiology, case management, water, sanitation and hygiene, logistics, community engagement and risk communication. All efforts must b...e well coordinated to ensure a rapid and effective response across sectors.
This document provides a framework for detecting and monitoring cholera outbreaks and organizing the response. It also includes a short section linking outbreak response to both preparedness and long-term prevention activities.
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The ICOPE Implementation Framework provides a score card to help assess the overall capacity of health and social care services and systems to deliver integrated care in community settings and support the development of ICOPE implementation action plans. There are 19 actions needed to implement ICOP...E on the services level (meso) and systems level (macro). The scoring process provides an evidence-based means of highlighting areas for improvement as well as establishing concrete measures of future improvements
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The United Nations (UN) adopted a new international legal instrument in November 2000, the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, supplementing the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. This contained a new definition of traf...ficking in persons and more particularly defined what was to be understood by child trafficking. The issue of human trafficking in general, and trafficking in children in particular, was highly relevant during the subsequent decade and anti-trafficking projects and initiatives attracted a great deal of funding. However, by the end of the decade, when funding declined, it was still not clear how much had been achieved.
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Development finance institutions owned by European governments and the World Bank Group are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on expensive for-profit hospitals in the Global South that block patients from getting care, or bankrupt them, with some even imprisoning patients who cannot afford th...eir bills. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, some of these same hospitals denied entry to patients suffering from the virus or sold intensive care beds at eyewatering prices to the highest bidder. These development institutions have woefully inadequate safeguards, invest via a complex web of tax-avoiding financial intermediaries, and offer little to zero evidence on the impacts their investments are having. Oxfam is calling on rich-country governments and the World Bank Group to immediately halt their spending on for-profit private healthcare, and for an urgent independent investigation to be conducted into all active and historic investments.
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This report, which involved input from across WaterAid, in particular from the Programme Support Unit (PSU) of WaterAid UK, includes case studies from a variety of countries, including Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Ghana, India and Nepal, each demonstrating what must be done now to i...mprove WASH services and address current challenges, in order to increase community resilience to climate change.
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Natural disasters often increase morbidity and mortality rates. Taking appropriate measures to maintain environmental health helps to reduce or eliminate the risks of preventable disease and death. Such measures contribute not only to the health of individuals in and near disaster-stricken areas, bu...t they also contribute to decreasing the high costs of providing emergency health services in the aftermath of disaster.
This document is divided into several parts. The first section primarily addresses the effects of natural disasters on environmental health conditions and services. In the second section, environmental health measures are described that should be undertaken in each of three time frames: the predisaster, disaster, and postdisaster periods.
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Health communication has proven to play a crucial role in addressing diseases such as dengue, Zika and chikungunya, for which there are no definitive or easily accessible vaccines. In this context, this discipline becomes a fundamental tool to promote the change behavior and promote preventive pract...ices that reduce the transmission of these diseases. By not having a definitive medical solution, accurate and timely information, effectively disseminated through educational campaigns, media and communication channels public health, can significantly influence individual and community actions to control the spread of these mosquito-borne viruses. The accumulated research around the threat of the aforementioned arboviral diseases brings together a series of recommendations around specific communication activities, such as disseminating timely and accurate information that integrates public health concerns and the needs of information of the population, especially vulnerable groups such as women of childbearing age, pregnant women and health workers.
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an operational guide to support all those responsible for planning and implementing the rollout of COVID-19 vaccine to refugees and migrants at national and local levels, 14 March 2022
Society first acknowledges a child’s existence and identity
through birth registration. The right to be recognized as
a person before the law is a critical step in ensuring
lifelong protection and is a prerequisite for exercising all
other rights. A birth certificate is proof of that legal ide...ntity, and is
the basis upon which children can establish a nationality,
avoid the risk of statelessness and seek protection from
violence and exploitation. For example, proof of age is
needed to help prevent child labour, child marriage and
underage recruitment into the armed forces. A birth
certificate may also be required to access social service
systems, including health, education and justice.
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Over the ages, human societies have altered local ecosystems and modified regional climates. Today the human influence has attained a global scale. This reflects the recent rapid increase in population size, energy consumption, intensity of land use, international trade and travel, and other human a...ctivities. These global changes have heightened awareness that the long-term good health of populations depends on the continued stability of biosphere's ecological, physical and socioeconomic systems.
The world's climate system is an integral part of the complex of life-supporting processes. Like other large systems, the global climate system is coming under pressure from human activities.
This book seeks to describe the context and process of global climate change, its actual or likely impacts on health, and how human societies and their governments should respond with particular focus on the health sector.
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UNAIDS is calling on governments to ensure that the right to health is realized by all by prioritizing public investments in health. At least half of the world’s population cannot access essential health services. Every two minutes a woman dies while giving birth. Among the people being left behin...d are women, adolescents, people living with HIV, gay men and other men who have sex with men, sex workers, people who inject drugs, transgender people, migrants, refugees and poor people.
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Hands-on information and practical advice for everyday life and work in the field as well as background information on crisis management structures in international organizations lie at the heart of the new handbook. It has been developed in the realm of Europe’s New Training Initiative for Civili...an Crisis Management (ENTRi) by the project coordination team at ZIF.
The handbook is designed to accompany civilian experts on their way to crisis management missions. In addition to providing a general overview of the institutional landscape of crisis management as well as relevant concepts, the handbook also provides practical information on a variety of issues that are common to working in a mission. From dealing with health and security challenges to technical information on radio operation, map reading, four-wheel driving – the ENTRi handbook is a valuable companion for work in a mission.
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Produced by Training and Research Support Centre for the Regional Network for Equity in Health in east and southern Africa (EQUINET), March 20, 2020.
This brief summarises and provides links to official, scientific and other resources to support an understanding of and individual to regional level... responses to the epidemic of ‘novel coronavirus’, also known as COVID-19.
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Health in All Policies (HiAP) is not a new concept. While the term “HiAP” has received much attention since the 1990s, the concept
of working across sectors of government for improved population health and wellbeing is much older than that. Over the last few decades the term has been applied t...o multiple health topics and challenges – whetherimplicitly or explicitly.
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This report shows that increased domestic revenues can and will cover only part of the necessary SDG budget spending of the LIDCs. Achieving the SDGs in the LIDCs will also require increases of both Official Development Assistance (ODA) and Private Development Assistance (PDA) to reach aggregate lev...els of SDG-directed development aid on the order of US$300-400 billion USD per year
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This guidance note developed by UNICEF explains how the WASH sector can implement infection prevention and control measures in households and community settings. It focuses on reducing the exposure to the disease in vulnerable community settings and public spaces, and the transmission of the disease... in home and community settings hosting patients and contacts. This brief is available in English, Spanish, and French here.
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Despite recent global declines, under-five mortality remains high in many of the poorest countries. Barriers to timely
quality care, including user fees, distance to facilities and the availability of trained health workers and medical supplies,
hinder progress in further reducing morbidity and m...ortality
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What are the local beliefs and practices around illnesses and death, the transmission of disease and spirituality, which affect decision-making (around health-seeking behaviour, caring for relatives and nature of burials) and can inform effective behaviour change interventions for preventing Ebola i...n Sierra Leone?
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The international community sits at the tipping pointof a post-‐antibiotic era, where common bacterial infections are no longer treatable with the antibiotic armamentarium that exists. In South Africa, t...he identification of the first case of pan-‐resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae(Brink et al, J Clin Microbiol. 2013;51(1):369-‐72) marks a watershed moment and highlights ourtip of the antibiotic resistance ‘iceberg’ in this country. Multi-‐drug resistant (MDR)-‐bacterial infections, predominantly in Gram-‐negative bacteria such as Klebsiella pneumoniae, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosaand Acinetobacter baumanniiare now commonplace in South African hospitals. Whilst a number of expensive new antibiotics for Gram-‐positive bacterial infections have been manufactured recently (some of which are licenced for usein South Africa), no new antibiotics active against Gram-‐negative infections are expected in the next 10-‐15years. Hence what we have now, needs conserving
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