More articles from COMMENTARY
- Using Digital Technology for Sexual and Reproductive Health: Are Programs Adequately Considering Risk?
Digital technologies provide opportunities for advancing sexual and reproductive health and services but also present potential risks. We propose 4 steps to reducing potential harms: (1) consider potential harms during intervention design, (2) mitigate or minimize potential harms during the design phase, (3) measure adverse outcomes during implementation, and (4) plan how to support those reporting adverse outcomes.
- Using the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Delivery Decision Tool to Consider Transporting Medical Supplies via Drone
We developed an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) Delivery Decision Tool to help health system decision makers identify their transport challenges and explore the potential utility and impact of UAVs on the broader health system.
- The Open Birth Interval: A Resource for Reproductive Health Programs and Women's Empowerment
The open birth interval is the time since a woman's last birth. It reflects not only desire for contraception and child health services but also freedom for outside activities, employment, and personal autonomy. It merits attention from policy makers, program managers, and service providers.
- Health Volunteers Overseas: A Model for Ethical and Effective Short-Term Global Health Training in Low-Resource Countries
Three core attributes enable short-term volunteers to make incremental contributions to long-term outcomes at host institutions: (1) focusing on teaching rather than service delivery, (2) engaging in mutually beneficial and equitable partnerships with host institutions, and (3) operating within a structured management system.
- Postabortion Family Planning Progress: The Role of Donors and Health Professional Associations
Global leadership from donors and international professional associations has enabled postabortion family planning services to be scaled up worldwide through preservice education, clinical service delivery, and global health programming.
- Supervision of Task-Shared Mental Health Care in Low-Resource Settings: A Commentary on Programmatic Experience
Task-shared mental health care programs in low-resource settings often incorporate supervisory structures that would be difficult to implement at scale, and many rely on foreign specialist experts as supervisors. Future programs could leverage peer supervision, technology, competency assessments/fidelity checklists, and other tools. Mental health care specialists will require training, support, and incentives to supervise generalist care providers.
- Leveraging a Partnership to Disseminate and Implement What Works in Family Planning and Reproductive Health: The Implementing Best Practices (IBP) Initiative
The IBP initiative, a WHO-based partnership of NGOs, civil society organizations, governments, academic institutions, and other implementing partners, promotes evidence-based global guidelines, tools, and other interventions for local application, and incorporates implementation experience and learning back into the global discourse.
- A Vaccine Against Cervical Cancer: Context for the Global Public Health Practitioner
Many low- and middle-income countries are moving to introduce HPV vaccine into their national immunization programs. To improve coverage, equity, and sustainability, public health officials and practitioners can use planning and implementation lessons learned, including successful school-based delivery strategies, innovative approaches to reach out-of-school girls, best practices for communication and social mobilization, and integration of services to reduce delivery cost. Policy makers, donors, and global partners should continue to consider ways to drive down costs of vaccine procurement.
- A Global Learning Agenda for the Levonorgestrel Intrauterine System (LNG IUS): Addressing Challenges and Opportunities to Increase Access
The LNG IUS is one of the most effective forms of reversible contraception and has important noncontraceptive benefits but is currently not used at scale in any Family Planning 2020 focus country. A global working group developed a shared learning agenda to answer critical questions, harmonize approaches, avoid duplication, and facilitate introduction of the method within the context of informed choice.
- Establishing Standards to Evaluate the Impact of Integrating Digital Health into Health Systems
The key milestones in the rise of digital health illustrate efforts to bridge gaps in the evidence base, a shifting focus to scale-up and sustainability, growing attention to the precise costing of these strategies, and an emergent implementation science agenda that better characterizes the ecosystem—the social, political, economic, legal, and ethical context that supports digital health implementation—necessary to take digital health approaches to scale.