Technical Note
Recently, the approach to hazardous events has undergone a considerable shift, away from reactive activities focused on managing and responding to events and towards a more proactive process of emergency and disaster risk management (DRM). The ultimate goal of this shift in focus is ...to prevent new and reduce existing disaster risks, a process known as disaster risk reduction (DRR), while strengthening individual, community, societal and global resilience.
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Stigma and discrimination related to mental health conditions are widespread and harmful. Reducing stigma and discrimination can benefit families, societies and economies – it can save lives. The toolkit offers practical guidance on how to achieve this, based on three core evidence-based principle...s: leadership or co-leadership by people with lived experience, social contact, and inclusive partnerships. These 3 principles can be realized using a four-step process: identify and define aims, plan and prepare, launch and learn and reflect and proceed. Twelve case studies from all across the world are provided to demystify the process. Stigma and discrimination can be ended if each of us acts as one using the principles in this toolkit.
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This updated implementation guidance is intended for all those who set policy for, or offer care to, pregnant women, families and infants: governments; national managers of maternal and child health programmes in general, and of breastfeeding- and BFHI-related programmes in particular; and health-f...acility managers at different levels (facility directors, medical directors, chiefs of maternity and neonatal wards). The document presents the first revision of the Ten Steps since 1989. The topic of each step is unchanged, but the wording of each one has been updated in line with the evidence-based guidelines and global public health policy.
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Traditional food markets play important economic, cultural, and social role and are sources of livelihood for millions of people in urban and rural areas. The manual Five keys for safer traditional food markets: risk mitigation in traditional food markets in the Asia-Pacific Region aims to support a...nd guide local authorities, market community, and consumers to transform these markets into safer and healthier places through practical risk mitigation measures and community engagement strategies. The manual provides guidance on the implementation of five keys to promote public health and safety, particularly, in the context of food safety, zoonoses diseases, and infectious respiratory diseases.
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Poor quality health services are holding back progress on improving health in countries at all income levels.
Today, inaccurate diagnosis, medication errors, inappropriate or unnecessary treatment, inadequate or unsafe clinical facilities or practices, or providers who lack adequate training an...d expertise prevail in all countries.
The situation is worst in low and middle-income countries where 10 percent of hospitalized patients can expect to acquire an infection during their stay, as compared to seven percent in high income countries. This is despite hospital acquired infections being easily avoided through better hygiene, improved infection control practices and appropriate use of antimicrobials.. At the same time, one in ten patients is harmed during medical treatment in high income countries.
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With Safety Tips for Conducting Community Meetings
Updated July 2020
This document includes key Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE) considerations during shifting lockdown measures, safety measures for conducting in-person community meetings, and a template that brings both of these... considerations together to help agencies adapt their RCCE approaches as these measures shift.
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The Lancet Regional Health Americas Volume 37100832 September 2024
The aim of this paper is to investigate how doctors working in primary health care in Latin American address patients with common mental disorders and to investigate how stigma can affect their clinical decisions
PLoSONE 13(11):e0206440.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206440
The purpose of this document is to provide agencies with a guide with three tools containing key assessment questions that are of common relevance to all actors involved in Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) independent of the phase of the emergency. This guide will be useful for rapid a...ssessments of MHPSS issues in humanitarian emergencies across sectors. The guide is designed for use by various humanitarian actors (governmental and non-governmental; local, national and global). It is based on the IASC Guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings (IASC, 2007).
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The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study, a collaborative endeavour of the World
Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank and the Harvard School of Public Health,
drew the attention of the international health community to the burden of neurological
disorders and many other chronic conditions. T...his study found that the burden of neurological
disorders was seriously underestimated by traditional epidemiological and health
statistical methods that take into account only mortality rates but not disability rates. The
GBD study showed that over the years the global health impact of neurological disorders
had been underestimated.
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The purpose of adding the books to the website of MCAI for download, is to make this life-saving, up-to-date information available to all who need it. Fill in a short registration field and you can download the pdf-files.
If you work in a hospital in a low income country - providing free care - y...ou are probably intitled to FREE copies of these books. MCAI will send them to you, all you have to do is to read our Flyer and fill in the request form.
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The purpose of the toolkit is to bring together existing learning and guidance as a starting point for stakeholders to begin SRH preparedness work. Within the SRH sector the field of preparedness is relatively new and growing. More collective effort is required to further evaluate the impact of prep...aredness efforts and push the field forward. This effort is a first attempt at a draft guidance for SRH preparedness, and is intended for field testing. The toolkit recognizes the longstanding work of the field of emergency and disaster risk management, and endeavors to bridge that work with the human rights-oriented and peoplecentered field of sexual and reproductive health.
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The impact of maternal mental health problems on infants in high income countries has been identified mostly in terms of psychosocial and emotional development, thanks to the groundbreaking early work of Spitz (2) and of Bowlby (3), who studied the emotional needs of infants and mother-child attachm...ent. Subsequently, a large body of literature, also from HICs, documented the effects of maternal mental health on the child's psychological development (4), intellectual competence(5), psychosocial functioning (6) and rate of psychiatric morbidity (7, 8).
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The seven essential features of practice for scaling up are described with great clarity. They are practical and universal, and encourage local innovation. They include policy, funding and local management structure, as well as working with all possible partners and developing local context adaptati...ons. The case studies give ideas and inspiration to develop new programmes and find ways around obstacles in existing programmes, especially through involving those with most at stake including users and their families and local community leaders
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The ASEAN Mental Health Systems Report
catalogues the situation of mental health in ASEAN
Member States. This report provides comprehensive
information on the progress made so far by AMS in
integrating mental health into national health systems,
increasing access to care as well as challenges f...aced.
It also offers recommendations on how to improve the mental health system in
respective ASEAN Member States.
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The study sought to understand the factors that facilitate women to adhere to treatment and return to health facilities for routine care from their own perspective. The researchers focused on Malawi, Uganda and Zambia, early adopters of the global guidance to provide lifelong treatment for pregnant ...women living with HIV (Option B+) and spoke to women living with HIV, healthcare workers and programme managers to discover which factors and practices show promise in supporting women to initiate and remain in care.
This study found that women living with HIV who access these services to prevent vertical transmission have a strong sense and understanding of what factors support their retention and how health facilities, the wider community and their friends and relations can best support them. This report shares their words to describe how it feels to walk in their shoes on the path of life long treatment.
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The emergence and transmission of zoonotic diseases are driven by complex interactions
between health, environmental, and socio-political systems. Human movement is considered
a significant and increasing factor in these processes, yet forced migration remains an
understudied area of zoonotic res...earch–due in part to the complexity of conducting interdisciplinary
research in these settings.
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Further Analysis of the 2010 and 2014 Cambodia Demographic and Health Surveys | DHS Further Analysis Reports No. 104
The aim of the WHO QualityRights tool kit is to support countries in assessing and
improving the quality and human rights of their mental health and social care facilities.
The tool kit is based on an extensive international review by people with mental disabilities
and their organizations. It ha...s been pilot-tested in low-, middle- and high-income
countries and is designed to be applied in all of these resource settings.
In this tool kit, the term ‘people with mental disabilities’ can include those with mental,
neurological or intellectual impairments and those with substance use disorders.
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To test for ethnic discrimination in access to outpatient health care services, we carry out
an email-correspondence study in Germany. We approach 3,224 physician offices in the 79
largest cities in Germany with fictitious appointment requests and randomized patients’
characteristics. We find t...hat patients’ ethnicity, as signaled by distinct Turkish versus Ger-
man names, does not affect whether they receive an appointment or wait time. In contrast,
patients with private insurance are 31 percent more likely to receive an appointment. Hold-
ing a private insurance also increases the likelihood of receiving a response and reduces the
wait time. This suggests that physicians use leeway to prioritize privately insured patients
to enhance their earnings, but they do not discriminate persons of Turkish origin based
on taste. Still, their behavior creates means-based barriers for economically disadvantaged
groups.
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