This new film, Youth Zones, Voices from Emergencies documents the lives of young people affected by conflict and natural disaster in five countries, including Uganda. It show how, in conflicts and natural disasters around the world, young people, at a crucial stage of their development, are faced with profound challenges. Emergencies often steal their adolescence and force them to undertake adult responsibilities. The structures and institutions that should guarantee their secure, peaceful development – schools, family, community and health centres – have often broken down, leaving them with little, if any, support. Access to basic sexual and reproductive health services, including information on sexually transmitted infections and HIV, is often impossible. Yet in the midst of hardship and deprivation, this film show how young people exhibit tremendous resilience. They raise their younger siblings, form youth groups and organisations, put food on the table for their families, conduct peer education activities, contribute to peace movements, galvanise their communities and contribute in numerous other ways to positive change. The film is available in English, Spanish, Arabic, and Luo with English subtitles.
Useful Resources
The updated 2010 healthcare workers handbook on influenza provides detailed guidelines on the diagnosis and management of influenza, both seasonal and pandemic, for healthcare workers in South Africa. It gives historical background to the disease in southern Africa, symptoms, case descriptions, information on laboratory testing and clinical management guidelines. The guide concludes with a section on infection management and control.
Results for Development has launched its new Centre for Health Market Innovations (CHMI), a new initiative that works to improve health markets in developing countries to deliver better results for the poor. CHMI is a publicly accessible global knowledge platform that collects, analyses and disseminates information about health market innovations and facilitates the creation of strategic links among key stakeholders. It provides access to interactive, comparable and filterable information on health market programmes. You can use CHMI for research, to allow you to promote your ideas, publications and programmes, and enable you to make better connections with people in the field. The website contains a programmes database and funder database. It also contains information about health market innovations, which are programmes and policies that harness market incentives and mitigate the negative effects of unregulated markets to provide better health and financial protection for the poor. You can join the conversation on the blog, as well as provide feedback on the site.
This is the first Model Formulary for Children released by the World Health Organization (WHO), which provides information on how to use over 240 essential medicines for treating illness and disease in children from 0 to 12 years of age. A number of individual countries have developed their own formularies over the years, but until now there was no single comprehensive guide to using medicines in children for all countries. The Model Formulary is the first resource for medical practitioners worldwide that provides standardised information on the recommended use, dosage, adverse effects and contraindications of medicines for use in children. The new Formulary is based on the best global evidence available as to which medicines should be used to treat specific conditions, how they should be administered and in what dose. The Formulary also identifies a number of areas where more research is needed to provide better treatment for children, such as child appropriate antibiotics to treat pneumonia and specific medicines for neonatal care.
Tobacco control is an area where the translation of evidence into policy would seem to be straightforward, given the wealth of epidemiological, behavioural and other types of research available. Yet, even here challenges exist. These include information overload, concealment of key (industry-funded) evidence, contextualisation, assessment of population impact and the changing nature of the threat. This article describes the steps that may be taken to develop a comprehensive tobacco control strategy: compilation of a list of potential interventions; modification of that list based on local needs and political constraints; streamlining the list by categorising interventions into broad groupings of related interventions to form the basis of a comprehensive plan; and refinement of the plan by comparing it to existing comprehensive plans. The proposed framework for adapting existing approaches to the local social and political climate may assist others planning for smoke-free societies. Additionally, this experience has implications for development of evidence-based health plans addressing other risk factors.
The East African Community (EAC) statistics database contains indices for a range of social sectors of countries in the region, including education, labour, culture, housing, environment and health. Population indices include life expectancy, mortality rates and demographic indicators. Health indices include public health expenditure per capita, expenditure on health to gross domestic product and public health expenditure to total budget. Statistics for immunisation rates and HIV prevalence are also supplied.
This tool, entitled 'Climate Change and Environmental Degradation Risk and Adaptation Assessment' (CEDRA), helps non-governmental organisations (NGOs) access and understand climate change and environmental degradation, and the science behind it, and compare this with local experience of environmental change. The tool was developed through NGO experience of problems as a result of changing weather patterns in countries like Afghanistan. CEDRA involves six steps: identifying environmental hazards, prioritising hazards that need to be addressed, selecting adaptation options, addressing unmanageable risks, considering new project locations, and a process of continual review, which should take place every year. It provides a check-list for each of the steps, with samples of questions that need to be asked, and underlines the involvement of beneficiary communities at every stage.
Funds for NGOs.org is an online initiative working for the sustainability of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) by increasing their access to external funders, resources and skills. It uses online technologies to spread knowledge about organisational sustainability, promote creative ideas for long-term generation of institutional funds for development interventions, improve professional efforts in resource mobilisation and advocate for increased allocation of donor resources for building the skills and capacities of NGOs.
The objective of this paper was to develop and publish a guideline for doctors managing acute viral bronchiolitis because this condition is extremely common in South Africa. Acute viral bronchiolitis is responsible for significant morbidity in the population, and subsequently a great deal of patient and parental distress, and the disease is costly, since many children are unnecessarily subjected to investigations and treatment strategies that are of no proven benefit. The main aims of the guideline are to promote an improved standard of treatment based on understanding of the disease and its management, and to encourage cost-effective and appropriate management. A detailed literature review was conducted and summarised into this document by a selected working group of paediatricians from around the country. Recommendations include the appropriate diagnostic and management strategies for acute viral bronchiolitis.
SURE is a collaborative project that builds on and supports the Evidence-Informed Policy Network (EVIPNet) in Africa and the Region of East Africa Community Health (REACH) Policy Initiative. These educational video and audio documentaries let people describe in their own words how the SURE project, a collaboration of EVIPNet Africa and REACH, is working to improve health systems in Africa by making better use of research evidence to inform decisions. The audience can hear this and see the context in which people are working. The documentaries can be downloaded and used in meetings or broadcasts to introduce concepts, raise awareness and generate discussion about evidence-informed health policymaking. They are targeted at a broad audience, including policymakers, researchers, stakeholders and the general public.