This case study examines country-level primary health care (PHC) systems in Kenya. The case study is part of a collection of case studies providing critical insights into key PHC strengths, challenges and lessons learned using the Astana PHC framework, which considers integrated health services, multisectoral policy and action, and people and communities. Led by in-country research teams, the case studies update and extend the Primary Health Care Systems (PRIMASYS) case studies commissioned by the Alliance in 2015.
Ensuring that members of society are healthy and reaching their full potential requires the prevention of disease and injury; the promotion of health and well-being; the assurance of conditions in which people can be healthy; and the provision of timely, effective, and coordinated health care. Achieving substantial and lasting improvements in population health will require a concerted effort from all these entities, aligned with a common goal. The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) requested that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) examine the integration of primary care and public health. Primary Care and Public Health identifies the best examples of effective public health and primary care integration and the factors that promote and sustain these efforts, examines ways by which HRSA and CDC can use provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to promote the integration of primary care and public health, and discusses how HRSA-supported primary care systems and state and local public health departments can effectively integrate and coordinate to improve efforts directed at disease prevention. This report is essential for all health care centers and providers, state and local policy makers, educators, government agencies, and the public for learning how to integrate and improve population health.
"The book reflects on the extent to which the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic influenced the education system in Africa, notably South Africa. The advent of the pandemic has brought a new context to the challenges of access, deepening the precarious position of African higher education systems. The pandemic underscored that African higher education systems are fragile and not uniformly resilient. The book discusses the challenges created or further entrenched by COVID-19 and how the typology of inequality across the differentiated institutions impacted the management of education delivery during COVID-19. Per se, lessons learned were documented to inform decision-making and practice while drawing conclusions for future usage. Even though the shift to emergency remote teaching was not foreseen and thus not coordinated, the authors argue that students' learning styles, perceptions of online learning and digital pedagogy should be considered in the post-COVID-19 curricula development processes"--
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented disruption worldwide highlighting once again the interdependency of health and socioeconomic development, and the global lack of health systems resilience. Two years into the pandemic, most countries report sustained disruptions across service delivery platforms and health areas with a profound impact on health outcomes. The impact of these disruptions is magnified within marginalized communities and in countries experiencing protracted conflict. There is an urgent need to focus on recovery through investment in the essential public health functions (EPHFs) and the foundations of health systems with a focus on primary health care, and whole-of-government and -society engagement. The aim of this Research Topic is to gather, transfer and promote operationalization of key experiences from COVID-19 to inform global and country level recovery that better promote health; guide policy direction towards building health systems resilience; and thereby ensure economic and social prosperity. Experience with COVID-19 has demonstrated that traditional approaches to health system strengthening have failed to achieve the complementary goals of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and health security with the divide between the most vulnerable and well-off only widening. Much of what had been learned from previous experiences such as Ebola in West Africa has not been widely applied. This has left health and economic systems vulnerable to 21 st century public health challenges, ranging from conflict and natural disasters to aging demographics and rising rates of non-communicable and communicable diseases and antimicrobial resistance. These challenges require intentional focus and investment as well as whole-of-government and -society engagement with health to build health system resilience. Greater action is needed to prevent the devastating effects of war and conflict on the health of the most vulnerable. This Research Topic will convene the knowledge and practices of leaders in public health, health systems, and humanitarian and development sectors. This is to ensure lessons from COVID-19 inform the recovery agenda and promote sustainable health and socioeconomic recovery for all. Lest we forget and find ourselves again unprepared and vulnerable in the face of an even greater threat.
If you are working in a time-sensitive context, need to deliver research findings so they can be used to inform decisions, or are finding it difficult to access research funding for long-term qualitative research, this book will help you. Introducing ‘rapid qualitative research’, it demonstrates how you can conduct high quality qualitative research within time, access and resource constraints. The book uses real world examples to illustrate the benefits and challenges of using rapid qualitative research designs. Focusing on the when, why and how, it explains the difference between cutting corners and making quick, well-informed research choices that support rigorous, credible research. Key features of the book include discussion questions and exercises for you to reflect on and apply your learning, as well as two case study chapters of real-world research so you can see rapid research in action. Written by the world’s leading expert on this subject, this book contains the theoretical and practical nuts and bolts you need to reframe existing qualitative methods, speed up your research, and make tangible contributions to your field. It is the perfect companion for any researcher, final-year undergraduate or postgraduate student looking to conduct rapid, but rigorous, qualitative research.
We assess the impact of Ethiopia’s flagship social protection program, the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) on the adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food and nutrition security of households, mothers, and children. We use both pre-pandemic in-person household survey data and a post-pandemic phone survey. Two thirds of our respondents reported that their incomes had fallen after the pandemic began and almost half reported that their ability to satisfy their food needs had worsened. Employing a household fixed effects difference-in-difference approach, we find that the household food insecurity increased by 11.7 percentage points and the size of the food gap by 0.47 months in the aftermath of the onset of the pandemic. Participation in the PSNP offsets virtually all of this adverse change; the likelihood of becoming food insecure increased by only 2.4 percentage points for PSNP households and the duration of the food gap increased by only 0.13 months. The protective role of PSNP is greater for poorer households and those living in remote areas. Results are robust to definitions of PSNP participation, different estimators and how we account for the non-randomness of mobile phone ownership. PSNP households were less likely to reduce expenditures on health and education by 7.7 percentage points and were less likely to reduce expenditures on agricultural inputs by 13 percentage points. By contrast, mothers’ and children’s diets changed little, despite some changes in the composition of diets with consumption of animal source foods declining significantly.
Lifestyle and Epidemiology - The Double Burden of Poverty and Cardiovascular Diseases in African Populations examines the profile of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in the rural South African population. The burden of diseases in South Africa is characterized by a combination of poverty-related diseases with emerging NCDs associated with urbanization, industrialization, and a Westernised lifestyle. Chapters in this book examine the effects of poverty, COVID-19, and other social factors on the prevalence of cardiovascular disease, reproductive health, and diabetes in rural South Africa.
This book focuses on Africa’s challenges, achievements, and failures over the past several centuries using an interdisciplinary approach that combines theory and fact and evidence-based practices and interventions in public health, and argues that most of the health problems in Africa are not a result of scarce or lack of resources, but of the misconceived and misplaced priorities that have left the continent behind every other on the globe in terms of health, education, and equitable distribution of opportunities and access to (quality) health as agreed by the United Nations member states at Alma-Ata in 1978.
Forced migration has yet to be sufficiently addressed from the perspective of health policy and systems research, resulting in limited knowledge on system‐level interventions and policies to improve the health of forced migrants. The contributions within this edited volume seek to rectify this gap in the literature by compiling the existing knowledge on health systems and health policy responses to forced migration with a focus on asylum seekers, refugees, and internally displaced people. It also brings together the work of research communities from the fields of political science, epidemiology, health sciences, economics, psychology, and sociology to push the knowledge frontier of health research in the area of forced migration towards health policy and systems-level interventions, while also framing potential routes for further research in this area. Among the analyses within the chapters: The political economy of health and forced migration in Europe Innovative humanitarian health financing for refugees Understanding the resilience of health systems Health security in the context of forced migration Discrimination as a health systems response to forced migration Health Policy and Systems Responses to Forced Migration offers unique and interdisciplinary theoretical, empirical, and literature-based perspectives that apply a health policy and systems approach to health and healthcare challenges among forced migrants. It will find an engaged audience among policy makers and analysts, international organizations, scholars in academia, think tanks, and students in undergraduate programs or at the graduate level, for policy, practice, and educational purposes.
