Health Topics
- Leveraging Experience From Active TB Drug-Safety Monitoring and Management for Monitoring Active Antiretroviral Toxicity
Systems established for active drug safety monitoring and management of drug-resistant TB should be leveraged to ensure comprehensive surveillance for active toxicity monitoring during scale-up of newer antiretroviral regimens.
- 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.
- A New Contraceptive Diaphragm in Niamey, Niger: A Mixed Methods Study on Acceptability, Use, and Programmatic Considerations
Through a pilot introduction in Niamey, Niger, we found that expanding method options to include the Caya diaphragm, a new self-care contraceptive product without side effects for most users, may address some of the challenges that contribute to very low contraceptive use.
- Lessons Learned From the Use of the Most Significant Change Technique for Adaptive Management of Complex Health Interventions
The Most Significant Change technique used in monitoring and evaluation has facilitated learning about the project scale-up and adaptive management of evidence-based family planning interventions across diverse project stakeholders in 11 countries in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
- What Distinguishes Women Who Choose to Self-Inject? A Prospective Cohort Study of Subcutaneous Depot Medroxyprogesterone Acetate Users in Ghana
Family planning projects and programs seeking to introduce, scale up, or market subcutaneous depot medroxyprogesterone acetate self-injection should first focus efforts on new family planning users, those never married, and those with at least a high school education level.
- Implementation of HIV Retesting During Pregnancy and Postpartum in Kenya: A Cross-Sectional Study
Strategies are needed to prevent missed opportunities to detect women with incident HIV infection during pregnancy or postpartum and maximize prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission efforts.
- COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy
Improving access to accurate information on vaccines and vaccination, increasing trust in reliable information sources, and counteracting misinformation can go a long way toward improving vaccination decision making.
- Uptake and Short-Term Retention in HIV Treatment Among Men in South Africa: The Coach Mpilo Pilot Project
In this pilot project, providing peer support to men living with HIV retained a high proportion of men living with HIV in the early stages of HIV treatment and successfully supported men in returning to care after a treatment interruption.
- Role of Information Sources in Vaccination Uptake: Insights From a Cross-Sectional Household Survey in Sierra Leone, 2019
Our findings suggest that health workers and faith leaders are important sources of information to deliver vaccination messages, given their strong association with vaccination confidence and uptake. In this context, vaccination promotion efforts that integrate faith leaders and health workers may help increase vaccination uptake.
- 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.