More articles from COMMENTARY
- Health System Resilience: Withstanding Shocks and Maintaining Progress
Building a resilient system capable of responding to health threats while maintaining essential health service delivery requires health systems to embed implementation research capacity to create the knowledge needed, ensure the affordability and accessibility of health care services at all levels of delivery, and provide the range of services needed to meet the population’s needs.
- The African Health Initiative’s Role in Advancing the Use of Embedded Implementation Research for Health Systems Strengthening
The African Health Initiative has demonstrated the feasibility of changing the traditional knowledge generation paradigm by using an embedded implementation research approach to improve health systems’ performance and strengthen capacity for knowledge generation and use.
- Learning From the Past: The Role of Social and Behavior Change Programming in Public Health Emergencies
The contributions of social and behavior change research/programming in 6 recent epidemics highlight the importance of further integrating such expertise into outbreak response.
- Infant Circumcision for Sexually Transmitted Infection Risk Reduction Globally
Population-based studies in high-income countries have failed to find that male circumcision protects against sexually transmitted infections. Using evidence from several sources, we show that male circumcision does protect against HIV during insertive intercourse for men who have sex with men.
- Diversifying Implementation Science: A Global Perspective
We present a joint global perspective about the urgent need to diversify the loci of knowledge creation and sharing in global implementation science. We underscore the imperative of addressing implementation research questions relevant to practitioners, policy makers, and researchers from low- and middle-income countries.
- Thematic Analysis and Mapping of Reproductive Empowerment Scales: A Tool for Family Planning Self-Care Programming and Research
Understanding the relationship between self-care and reproductive empowerment is necessary to improve family planning self-care interventions. We offer a thematic analysis of 5 validated scales measuring reproductive empowerment-related concepts that could be used by self-care family planning programmers and researchers.
- What Do We Demand? Responding to the Call for Precision and Definitional Agreement in Family Planning’s “Demand” and “Need” Jargon
This commentary offers a response to the call to improve family planning language that describes “need” and “demand” and proposes a set of recommendations to add precision, improve measurement, and foster shared understanding in family planning.
- Three Pivots for Improving Health Care Provider Performance
We share recommendations on 3 important pivots away from longstanding approaches to continued professional development and in-service training programs that have demonstrated a measurable benefit across a diversity of health-related applications and projects.
- Language and Measurement of Contraceptive Need and Making These Indicators More Meaningful for Measuring Fertility Intentions of Women and Girls
We examine current “need”-based family planning measures that are based on women’s fertility desires and contraceptive use, identify challenges with language and use of need-based measures, and recommend ways to improve language and measurement.
- Maintaining Polio-Free Status in Indonesia During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Despite the negative impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on polio eradication efforts, ensuring the high coverage of polio immunization and high performance of surveillance are essential to maintaining Indonesia’s polio-free status and the reaching the 2023 global polio eradication target.