This book describes the principal conceptual, methodological, and empirical developments stemming from PAHO and WHO's institutional efforts in public health, which have entailed the broad and committed participation of the Member States. It provides and overview of the status of Essential Public Health Functions (EPHF) in 41 countries and territories of the Americas, based on self-evaluation exercises performed by health authorities to measure their performance.
This is the first in-depth guide to global community psychology research and practice, history and development, theories and innovations, presented in one field-defining volume. This book will serve to promote international collaboration, enhance theory utilization and development, identify biases and barriers in the field, accrue critical mass for a discipline that is often marginalized, and to minimize the pervasive US-centric view of the field.
This international handbook brings together researchers and teachers from 25 countries of the five continents to share their experiences of teaching health promotion in undergraduate and graduate courses related to different health professions. Chapter authors share teaching methodologies used in classes, discuss the competencies students need to learn and indicate research opportunities. Readers will be provided with real-world examples of empowering, participatory, holistic, intersectoral, equitable and sustainable teaching/learning strategies that aim to improve health and reduce health inequities. This handbook was edited by an editorial board formed by 12 members of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE) from seven countries – Brazil, Belgium, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, Taiwan and UK –, and includes 45 chapters organized in seven thematic sections, each one dedicated to a different aspect of the process of teaching and learning health promotion: The health promotion curriculum Making health promotion relevant to practice Pedagogies for health promotion Special topics for health promotion Health promotion assessment and quality assurance Health promotion as a transformational practice Students’ reflections The International Handbook of Teaching and Learning in Health Promotion: Practices and Reflections from Around the World aims to encourage a dialogue between teaching and learning practices carried out locally and the possibilities of replicating these experiences globally, recognizing cultural differences and similarities. This handbook is intended for a wide range of readers, including education and training providers, health professionals and health care students. Due to its intersectoral and interdisciplinary approach, it will also be of interest to teachers and students in other fields of the Social Sciences, such as Urban Planning, Social Work, Public Policy, International Relations and Population Studies.
More and more, health promotion is a crucial component of public health, to the extent that public health interventions are called on to prove their effectiveness and appraised for scientific validity, a practice many in the field consider self-defeating. Health Promotion Evaluation Practices in the Americas cogently demonstrates that scientific rigor and the goals of health promotion are less in conflict than commonly thought, synthesizing multiple traditions from countries throughout North, Central, and South America (and across the developed-to-developing-world continuum) for a volume that is both diverse in scope and unified in purpose. The book’s examples—representing robust theoretical and practical literatures as well as initiatives from Rio de Janeiro to American Indian communities—explain why health promotion evaluation projects require different guidelines from mainstream evaluative work. The editors identify core humanitarian principles associated with health promotion (participation, empowerment, equity, sustainability, intersectoral action, multistrategy, and contextualism), while chapters highlight challenges that must be mastered to keep these principles and scientific objectives in sync, including: (1) Building health promotion values into evaluation research projects. (2) Expanding the use of evaluation in health promotion. (3) Developing meaningful evaluation questions. (4) Distinguishing between community-based participation research and evaluation-based participation. (5) Evaluating specifically for equity. (6) Designing initiatives to foster lasting social change. The applied knowledge in Health Promotion Evaluation Practices in the Americas: Values and Research can bring the goals of intervention into sharper focus for practitioners, evaluators, and decision-makers and facilitate communication on all sides—necessary steps to progress from study findings to real-world action.
This book critically analyses the influence of international policies and guidelines on the performance of interventions aimed at reducing health inequities in Latin America, with special emphasis on health promotion and health in all policies strategies. While the implementation of these interventions plays a key role in strengthening these countries’ capacity to respond to current and future challenges, the urgency and pressures of cooperation and funding agencies to show results consistent with their own agendas not only hampers this goal, but also makes the territory invisible, hiding the real problems faced by most Latin American countries, diminishing the richness of local knowledge production, and hindering the development of relevant proposals that consider the territory’s conditions and cultural identity. Departing from this general analysis, the authors search for answers to the following questions: Why, despite the importance of the theoretical advances r egarding actions to address social and health inequities, haven’t Latin American countries been able to produce the expected results? Why do successful initiatives only take place within the framework of pilot projects? Why does the ideology of health promotion and health in all policies mainly permeate structures of the health sector, but not other sectors? Why are intersectoral actions conjunctural initiatives, which often fail to evolve into permanent practices? Based on an extensive literature review, case studies, personal experiences, and interviews with key informants in the region, Globalization and Health Inequities in Latin America presents a strategy that uses monitoring and evaluation practices for enhancing the capacity of Latin American and other low and middle-income countries to implement sustainable processes to foster inclusiveness, equity, social justice and human rights. p/pp
This forward-looking resource recasts the concept of healthy cities as not only a safe, pleasant, and green built environment, but also one that creates and sustains health by addressing social, economic, and political conditions. It describes collaborations between city planning and public health creating a contemporary concept of urban governance—a democratically-informed process that embraces values like equity. Models, critiques, and global examples illustrate institutional change, community input, targeted assessment, and other means of addressing longstanding sources of urban health challenges. In these ambitious pages, healthy cities are rooted firmly in the worldwide movement toward balanced and sustainable urbanization, developed not to disguise or displace entrenched health and social problems, but to encourage and foster solutions. Included in the coverage: Towards healthy urban governance in the century of the city“/li> Healthy cities emerge: Toronto, Ottawa, Copenhagen The role of policy coalitions in understanding community participation in healthy cities projects Health impact assessment at the local level The logic of method for evaluating healthy cities Plus: extended reports on healthy cities and communities in North and Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East Healthy Cities will interest and inspire community leaders, activists, politicians, and entrepreneurs working to improve health and well-being at the local level, as well as public health and urban development scholars and professionals.
"This volume is a textbook on linear control systems with an emphasis on stochastic optimal control with solution methods using spectral factorization in line with the original approach of N. Wiener. Continuous-time and discrete-time versions are presented in parallel.... Two appendices introduce functional analytic concepts and probability theory, and there are 77 references and an index. The chapters (except for the last two) end with problems.... [T]he book presents in a clear way important concepts of control theory and can be used for teaching." —Zentralblatt Math "This is a textbook intended for use in courses on linear control and filtering and estimation on (advanced) levels. Its major purpose is an introduction to both deterministic and stochastic control and estimation. Topics are treated in both continuous time and discrete time versions.... Each chapter involves problems and exercises, and the book is supplemented by appendices, where fundamentals on Hilbert and Banach spaces, operator theory, and measure theoretic probability may be found. The book will be very useful for students, but also for a variety of specialists interested in deterministic and stochastic control and filtering." —Applications of Mathematics "The strength of the book under review lies in the choice of specialized topics it contains, which may not be found in this form elsewhere. Also, the first half would make a good standard course in linear control." —Journal of the Indian Institute of Science
