Table of Contents
EDITORIALS
- Low-Dose Antenatal Calcium Supplementation: An Intervention Ready for Prime Time
New evidence of the effectiveness of low-dose antenatal calcium supplementation for preventing preeclampsia and preterm birth provides additional protection for pregnant women and their newborns in settings where calcium intake is low.
VIEWPOINT
- Sexuality Education for Youth and Adolescents in the Middle East and North Africa Region: A Window of Opportunity
The enabling role of Islam in the notion of sexuality education can serve as a window of opportunity for implementing culturally and contextually relevant sexuality education programs in the Middle East and North Africa region.
- Barriers to Decolonizing Global Health: Identification of Research Challenges Facing Investigators Residing in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
The practice of global health is plagued by power structures favoring high-income countries. Efforts to decolonize global health must consider the systemic limitations that LMIC investigators face at local, national, and international levels.
ORIGINAL ARTICLES
- Barriers and Facilitators to Implementing a Community-Based Psychosocial Support Intervention Conducted In-Person and Remotely: A Qualitative Study in Quibdó, Colombia
This study explores contextual barriers and facilitators and perceived psychosocial changes associated with implementing a community-based psychosocial support group intervention for conflict-affected adults delivered via in-person and remote modalities and presents recommendations for strengthening the provision of community-based services within routine mental health services in Colombia.
- Surgical System Efficiency and Operative Productivity in Public and Private Health Facilities in Ethiopia: A Cross-Sectional Evaluation
The surgical system in Ethiopia in both public and private health facilities was inefficient, requiring immediate action to improve timely access to safe surgical care.
- Improving TB Case Detection Through Active Case-Finding: Results of Multiple Intervention Strategies in Hard-to-Reach Riverine Areas of Southern Nigeria
To address TB control efforts more comprehensively, active case-finding is another important approach to increasing TB case detection rates, especially in hard-to-reach areas with high-risk populations.
- Risk for Severe Intimate Partner Violence in Nairobi’s Informal Settlements: Tailoring the Danger Assessment to Kenya
Although a tailored 16-item weighted danger assessment may be valuable for research purposes, the unweighted 16-item Kenya-Danger Assessment is most valuable for implementation among practitioners working directly with intimate partner violence survivors, given simplicity for field implementation.
- Effectiveness of Capacity-Building and Quality Improvement Interventions to Improve Day-of-Birth Care in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo
A low-dose, high-frequency capacity-building approach coupled with quality improvement interventions improved health care provider performance and maternal and newborn health outcomes.
FIELD ACTION REPORTS
- Operational Challenges in Conducting a Subnational TB Prevalence Survey in India: Lessons Learned for Resource-Limited, High-Burden Settings
TB prevalence surveys can help estimate the burden of disease and prioritize resources for TB control. Anticipating operational challenges and addressing them in a timely manner can help ensure the successful implementation of the survey.
REVIEWS
- When a Toolkit Is Not Enough: A Review on What Is Needed to Promote the Use and Uptake of Immunization-Related Resources
While resources like toolkits and guidance play an important role in promoting adherence to evidence-based practice in the administration of routine immunization programs, simply creating these resources is not enough. More work is needed to understand how to promote uptake and use of these resources by routine immunization programs.
PROGRAM CASE STUDIES
- Institutionalizing Innovation: From Pilot to Scale for Co-Packaged Oral Rehydration Salts and Zinc—A Case Study in Zambia
A multisector partnership developed a locally contextualized and owned holistic approach to project design and implementation; this process provided a strong learning platform to take a novel yet simple lifesaving health product from trial to sustainable scale-up.
- Collaboration in a Partnership for Primary Health Care: A Case Study From Papua New Guinea
Four key factors that influence collaboration in a public-private partnership (PPP) are relationships, time, governance, and the impact of change. Incorporating these factors into PPP design and implementation in similar settings can increase coordinated action and improvements in primary health care.
COMMENTARIES
Current efforts to ensure health commodity security in Africa must be extended to include transforming existing public and private logistics infrastructure for inventory management into a state of prudent multiplicity while also considering efforts to improve product selection, demand quantification, procurement, and service delivery.
There is an urgent need to better understand the role of climate change on sexual and reproductive health outcomes, particularly among adolescent girls and young women in low- and middle-income countries. Stakeholders at all levels should apply a rights-based, gendered approach to climate action and adaptation.
Bangladesh has inspired the rest of the world with its remarkable health achievements over the past half-century. A considerably stronger government investment in health care is now needed to achieve universal health coverage and “Health for All” in Bangladesh.
We propose a detailed framework for contraceptive agency to serve as a rights-based guide for centering individuals’ ability to make and act on their own contraceptive choices, regardless of what those choices are, in program design and evaluation.