Health
Health
The ability of countries to provide available, affordable, and high quality healthcare services to their populations has become a global priority. However, at least half of the population around the world still don’t have access to essential healthcare, and around 100 million people are pushed into extreme poverty because they have to pay for healthcare. Universal… Read more
Capacity building is an important element in health for successfully tackling social health inequalities by improving the capacity of health actors and institutions at national, regional, and local levels. Capacity building looks at “development of sustainable skills, organisational structures, resources, and commitment to health improvement in health and other sectors, to prolong and multiply health gains”…. Read more
Girls and women need effective, safe, and affordable menstrual products. Single-use products are regularly selected by agencies for resource-poor settings; the menstrual cup is a less known alternative. The authors reviewed international studies on menstrual cup leakage, acceptability, and safety and explored menstrual cup availability to inform programmes. The review indicates that menstrual cups are… Read more
Vimal Kumar, principal consultant in the Oxford Policy Management Health team, discusses the importance of procurement and supply chain management in supporting effective policy reforms. Ensuring availability, affordability, and quality of commodities (for example medicines) to provide services to the patients is one of the key outcomes which procurement and supply chain management establishes. This… Read more
In 2017 the Canadian IDRC concluded a six-year programme supporting research organisations in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lebanon, Peru and Vietnam in the development and testing of solutions to strengthen health systems through information technology. The programme under the title ‘Strengthening Equity through Applied Research Capacity building in eHealth’ (SEARCH) set out four objectives:… Read more
Kenya has some of the highest rates of maternal and neonatal mortality in the world at 360/100,000 and 22/1,000 live births respectively. Translated into numbers – this equates to about 7000 maternal deaths and 29,000 neonatal deaths per year in Kenya. The DFID-funded Reducing Maternal and Neonatal Death in Kenya programme aims to reduce mortality… Read more
This resource provides an overview of the key issues in relation to Quality of Maternal and Newborn (MNH) Services, and signposts key resources for further reading. Originally designed for the cadre of Health Advisers at DFID, it has been adapted to suit a broad range of actors involved in strengthening policy and programming interventions. This resource has been collaboratively produced by… Read more
This blog, by Anthony Kinghorn, originally appeared on the Oxford Policy Management website, and is reposted with their permission. World AIDS Day is a time to celebrate successes in tackling the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The global response has achieved reductions in the numbers of AIDS deaths and of new infections which we might once have thought… Read more
The Delivering Reproductive Health Results (DRHR) programme used social franchising (SF) and social marketing (SM) approaches to increase the supply of high quality family planning services in underserved areas of Pakistan. The authors of this paper assessed the costs, cost-efficiency and cost-effectiveness of DRHR to understand the value for money of these approaches. Financial and… Read more
Literature on cultural practices for burial and care for the sick among individual ethnic groups in South Sudan was very limited. However, it clearly points to the importance of proper burials among all ethnic groups: these typically entail washing the body of the deceased; it can take several days before burial takes place; and graves… Read more
This annual review summary sheet captures the headlines on programme performance, agreed actions and learning over the course of the review period (2016/2017) for the Reducing Maternal and Neonatal Deaths in Kenya programme. The programme is implemented by three core partners: i) the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) is scaling up training in Emergency… Read more