Latest Articles
- Client-centered counseling improves client satisfaction with family planning visits: evidence from Irbid, Jordan
In Irbid, Jordan, a combination of community outreach, using home visits, plays, women's groups, and religious leaders, and improved client-provider counseling based on the “Consult and Choose” approach increased family planning demand and client satisfaction. Service statistic trends suggest increased contraceptive use.
- High and equitable mass vitamin A supplementation coverage in Sierra Leone: a post-event coverage survey
In Sierra Leone, an intensive mass vitamin A supplementation (VAS) campaign to reduce under-5 mortality reached over 90% of children ages 6–59 months, eliminating coverage disparities among districts and between age groups. Delivering VAS with other essential maternal and child health interventions was key to the success.
- Improving performance of Zambia Defence Force antiretroviral therapy providers: evaluation of a standards-based approach
A detailed standards-based performance approach modestly improved providers' performance and facility readiness to offer antiretroviral therapy. The approach included mutually reinforcing activities: (1) training, (2) supportive supervision, (3) assessments of service quality, and (4) facility-based action plans.
- Focusing on implementation: the power of executing many small advances well
Success often comes through many small, incremental, well-executed improvements.
- Contraceptive implants: providing better choice to meet growing family planning demand
Contraceptive implants are extremely effective, long acting, and suitable for nearly all women—to delay, space, or limit pregnancies—and they are increasingly popular. Now, markedly reduced prices and innovative service delivery models using dedicated non-physician service providers offer a historic opportunity to help satisfy women's growing need for family planning.
- Open-source collaboration for Global Health: Science and Practice
USAID and the Schools of Public Health at JHU and GWU welcome you to the inaugural issue of GHSP—an open-access, peer-reviewed journal for the global health community, particularly program implementers, to contribute to and benefit from a dialogue based on science and practical programmatic experience.
- GeneXpert for TB diagnosis: planned and purposeful implementation
Xpert MTB/RIF is a major advance for TB diagnostics, especially for multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB and HIV-associated TB. But implementation concerns including cost, technical support requirements, and challenging demands of providing second-line TB drugs for diagnosed MDR-TB cases call for gradual, careful introduction based on country circumstances.
- Lessons learned from scaling up a community-based health program in the Upper East Region of northern Ghana
The original CHPS model deployed nurses to the community and engaged local leaders, reducing child mortality and fertility substantially. Key scaling-up lessons: (1) place nurses in home districts but not home villages, (2) adapt uniquely to each district, (3) mobilize local resources, (4) develop a shared project vision, and (5) conduct “exchanges” so that staff who are initiating operations can observe the model working in another setting, pilot the approach locally, and expand based on lessons learned.
- Can we stop AIDS with antiretroviral-based treatment as prevention?
Challenges to scaling up treatment as prevention (TasP) of HIV transmission are considerable in the developing-world context and include accessing at-risk populations, human resource shortages, adherence and retention in care, access to newer treatments, measurement of treatment effects, and long-term sustainable funding. Optimism about ending AIDS needs to be tempered by the realities of the logistic challenges of strengthening health systems in countries most affected and by balancing TasP with overall combination prevention approaches.