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Showing results for tags 'Low income countries'.
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Content ArticleThere has been little evaluation of strategies to strengthen regulation in LMIC, a notable exception being the Kenya Patient Safety Impact Evaluation (KePSIE), a collaboration between the Kenyan Ministry of Health and the World Bank. KePSIE is one of the worlds largest trials on improving patient safety, testing at scale complementary approaches to protect patients and prevent disease outbreaks. KePSIE provides validated tools to measure patient safety and assess facility performance in resource-poor primary care settings across multiple domains; development of an inspection checklist in collaboration with the country and large-scale pilot of inspections using a professional cadre and globally relevant empirical evidence on the effectiveness of government inspections and consumer empowerment to ensure patient safety.
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Content ArticleThis guide by the non-profit organisation US Pharmacopeia highlights the global challenge of substandard and falsified Covid-19 vaccines and the impact this has on individuals, the ability to control the pandemic, larger societal health, public trust and social justice. It outlines strategies to help prevent, detect and respond to substandard and falsified vaccines, in line with existing World Health Organization processes.
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Content ArticleLast November, the UK, under its G7 Presidency, convened an event on patient safety entitled Patient Safety: from Vision to Reality, co-sponsored with the World Health Organization (WHO). The event was designed to build upon recent prominent initiatives taken forward by the UK Government and partner Member States to demonstrate the importance of taking action and facilitating collaboration to advance patient safety as an urgent global priority. This includes: annual Global Ministerial Summits on Patient Safety (from 2016) a Resolution on Global Action on Patient Safety (adopted by the World Health Assembly in 2019); and, the Global Patient Safety Collaborative developed in 2018 by the UK Government in partnership with the WHO to support patient safety improvement in low- and middle-income countries. Coupled with WHO’s Global Patient Safety Action Plan 2021-2030 and an annual World Patient Safety Day on 17th September, such initiatives will ensure that momentum can be maintained in order to tackle the truly global issue of patient safety within the wider context of strengthening national health systems. The link below is a recording of the event.
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Content Article
In this interview, Dr Alice Ladur talks about her experience of using the Whose Shoes? approach to increase male partners’ involvement in maternity care in Uganda. Whose Shoes? is a co-production tool that uses a board game to help participants share experiences and reflect on their experiences of services. Alice describes the importance and impact of involving partners and families in antenatal care and highlights the value of adapting interventions to specific cultures and locations. -
Content ArticleThis free e-learning course by the World Health Organization (WHO) examines the five general steps of inequality monitoring in the context of immunisation programmes. The 'WHO Immunization Agenda 2030: a global strategy to leave no one behind' envisions “a world where everyone, everywhere, at every age, fully benefits from vaccines for good health and well-being.” The course is approximately two hours long and is primarily aimed at monitoring and evaluation officers for immunisation, and people who have basic knowledge and experience working with immunisation data.
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This is the first in our new series of Patient Safety Spotlight interviews, where we talk to different people about their role and what motivates them to make health and social care safer. Josie tells us about the nursing error that first sparked her interest in patient safety, how a just culture helps healthcare workers and systems learn from their mistakes, and how her love of skiing has inspired her to think differently about risk in healthcare. -
Content Article
Blog - Safe medicine saves lives (14 January 2022)
Patient-Safety-Learning posted an article in Medication
In this blog, Roohil Yusuf, Global Pharmacy Advisor at Save the Children, looks at the different factors involved in providing access to life-saving medication, including planning, sourcing, use and management of medicines. She tells the story of Habibah, a three-year-old girl from Nigeria, who was able to access medication for Severe Acute Nutrition and tuberculosis at one of Save the Children's treatment centres. She also looks at the dangers of counterfeit and expired medicines, and explores how organisations can take steps to prevent poor quality, counterfeit or expired medicines being given to patients. -
Content ArticlePatient safety is a key goal of the WHO as a central component of high-quality health systems. Increasing efforts have been made to improve quality of care in low-resource settings but identifying harms and developing strategies to deliver safe care has been given less attention. Charles Vincent and colleagues describe a ‘portfolio’ approach to safety improvement in four broad categories: prioritising critical processes, improving the organisation of care, control of risks and enhancing responses to hazardous situations that they believe is relevant to low-resource settings. They consider how practitioners, especially those in low-resource setting hospitals, might employ these strategies and focus attention on the possible roles of practitioner groups and professional associations as key to advancing patient safety through collaboration and skill development in this field.
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Content ArticleIn this podcast, Gill Phillips speaks to Dr Alice Ladur who has used the Whose Shoes?® board game in her PhD project in Uganda, working with men to bring about culture change and improve maternal outcomes. Gill developed Whose Shoes?® as a tool to allow people to 'walk in other people's shoes'. Through a wide range of scenarios and topics, Whose Shoes?® helps groups explore many of the concerns, challenges and opportunities facing the different groups affected by the transformation of health and social care.
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Content Article
This is the third of a short series of blogs in which we take a look back at our work in five areas of patient safety during 2021. In this blog we look at how we’ve been highlighting patient safety concerns relating to health inequalities. Through our work, Patient Safety Learning seeks to harness the knowledge, insights, enthusiasm and commitment of health and social care organisations, professionals and patients for system-wide change and the reduction of avoidable harm. We believe patient safety is not just another priority; it is a core purpose of health and social care. Patient safety should not be negotiable. -
Content ArticleAntibiotic resistance is a natural phenomenon that happens when bacteria develop the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them. This case study focuses on large outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant strains of cholera and typhoid in Zimbabwe. It describes the steps taken to tackle the outbreaks, including a mass typhoid Vi-conjugate vaccine (TCV) vaccination campaign from February to March 2019 in nine suburbs of Harare that were severely affected by the outbreak.
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EventuntilPatient safety is a critical global public health issue and is essential if health systems are to advance and achieve universal health coverage (UHC). Every year, an inadmissible number of patients are harmed or die because of unsafe and poor-quality healthcare, exerting a very high global burden especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Even before the pandemic, 1 in 10 patients in high-income countries were harmed from safety lapses during their hospital care. This number is greater in LMICs where adverse events in healthcare contribute to around 2.6 million hospital deaths each year. With the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, patient safety has become an even more crucial area for international cooperation. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland invites you to join a high-level event on patient safety, co-sponsored by the World Health Organization, to: Illustrate the scale and significant burden of avoidable harm in healthcare globally and its impact on patients, families, healthcare workers, health system finances, communities and societies. Advocate a vision for eliminating avoidable harm in healthcare and demonstrate the need to prioritise patient safety as a global health priority, including by supporting strategic patient safety initiatives. Advocate for all countries to designate patient safety officers responsible for the coordination of patient safety implementation at national and facility levels. Register
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Content ArticleIn this study in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, the authors examined the views of men from Uganda currently living in the UK of an educational board game used to promote engagement in maternal health. Men can play a significant role in reducing maternal morbidity and mortality in low-income countries and maternal health programmes are increasingly looking for innovative interventions to engage men to help improve health outcomes for pregnant women. The study found that men were receptive to the board game and reported that easy-to-understand visual aids and messages helped change their perspective. Participants suggested that the game needs to be adapted to the local context for use with men in rural Uganda.
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Content ArticleThere is widespread consensus that learning is crucial for the performance of health systems and the achievement of broader health goals. However, this consensus is not matched by shared knowledge and understanding of how health systems learn, or of how to improve health systems learning across different contexts. The report is aimed at an audience of diverse stakeholders invested in strengthening health systems, and aims to achieve two things. First, to move towards a shared language and frameworks to discuss the problems and solutions of learning, as they apply to health systems. Second, the report seeks to advance action on learning – by providing stakeholders with clarity on steps that they can undertake to advance learning for health systems. This report is intended to be a starting point for gaining a shared understanding of learning health systems as an actionable agenda. The hope is that it will spur useful conversations and fuel the movement for better informed, more analytical and more self-reliant health systems – especially in the context of low- and middle-income countries.
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Content ArticleThe 17 September marks World Patient Safety Day, and this year the focus is on ‘Safe maternal and newborn care’. Recently there has been greater research attention on patient safety in low- and middle-income countries due to the global awareness of the need to improve safety standards for all patients, including in maternal care. In this blog, I highlight the scale of maternal and newborn death in low- and middle-income countries, the contributing factors to this, and the need to improve maternal health and safety.
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Content ArticleThis is a study evaluating the implementation of a patient safety programme across a paediatric department at the largest public hospital in Guatemala. In their conclusion, the authors note that implementing such programmes in low-resource settings requires recognition of facilitators such as staff receptivity and patient-centredness as well as barriers such as lack of training in patient safety and poor organisational incentives.
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Content ArticleImproving patient safety during anesthesia and surgery is a major public health issue, with safety standards varying from country to country. Anesthesia safety is often hampered by complex problems in low income countries. This survey assesses the unmet anesthesia needs in Ethiopia. The author concludes that anesthesia safety in Ethiopia appears challenged by substandard continuous medical education and continuous professional development practice, and limited availability of some essential equipment and medications. The study states that while patient monitoring and anesthesia conduct are relatively good, World Health Organization surgical safety checklist application and postoperative pain management are very low, affecting the delivery of safe anesthesia conduct.
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Content ArticleThere is an overall dearth of information on implementation and compliance with patient safety standards in developing countries. In recognition of this, the World Bank Group’s Health in Africa Initiative, WHO and the PharmAccess Foundation came together with the ministries of health to conduct an assessment of patient safety at Kenyan health facilities. The study is the first nationwide assessment of patient safety levels based on documented processes and levels of risk, and is meant to serve as a baseline against which future interventions can be measured.
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Content ArticleDiagnostics function as a compass in healthcare. They help determine the cause of a person’s condition, thus steering the healthcare provider towards the appropriate treatment or care pathway to address a disease and determine whether the approach is working. Despite their value in the healthcare delivery system, innovation, implementation, reimbursement and accessibility include barriers that constrain the use of diagnostics, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where increased availability could lower healthcare costs while saving lives. How can leaders increase affordable access to essential diagnostics globally? How can diagnostic advances be supported without contributing to growing disparities across the globe? This report seeks to address these questions through a landscape review of the global diagnostic ecosystem – including identifying key stakeholders, barriers and enablers along the product life cycle and the effectiveness of diagnostics – while highlighting the various challenges, opportunities and potential solutions across high-income countries and LMICs.
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Content ArticleThere are estimated 24 000–60 000 women who are pregnant and incarcerated worldwide and they often lack access to antenatal care at the same level as that available in their communities. Despite clear international standards that mandate equivalent care for people in prison, pregnant women in these settings face significant barriers to adequate antenatal care. The needs of pregnant women are often overlooked in prisons designed to house men . We must not forget this vulnerable and hidden cohort of women. Molly Skerker et al. explore the challenges for pregnant women in prisons worldwide.
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Content ArticleIn fragile, conflict-affected and vulnerable settings there is an urgent need for action on quality of healthcare, given the significant health needs of the populations in these environments and the increasing numbers of people for whom such settings are home.
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Content ArticleEvidence on heterogeneity in outcomes of surgical quality interventions in low-income and middle-income countries is limited. Alidina et al. explored the factors driving performance in the Safe Surgery 2020 intervention in Tanzania’s Lake Zone to distil implementation lessons for low-resource settings. They found that performance experiences of higher and lower performers differed on the following themes: (1) preintervention context, (2) engagement with Safe Surgery 2020 interventions, (3) teamwork and communication orientation, (4) collective learning orientation, (5) role of leadership, and (6) perceived impact of Safe Surgery 2020 and beyond. Higher performers had a culture of teamwork which helped them capitalise on Safe Surgery 2020 to improve surgical ecosystems holistically on safety practices, teamwork and communication. Lower performers prioritised overhauling safety practices and began considering organisational cultural changes much later. Thus, while also improving, lower performers prioritised different goals and trailed higher performers on the change continuum. The authors conclude that future interventions should be tailored to facility context and invest in strengthening teamwork, communication and collective learning and facilitate leadership engagement to build a receptive climate for successful implementation of safe surgery interventions.
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News ArticleA new fixed-dose combination (FDC) of “3HP”, a short-course tuberculosis (TB) preventive treatment (TPT) combining two drugs, rifapentine and isoniazid, is starting to be rolled out in five TB high burden countries in Africa. This will reduce the number of pills that people who need the treatment have to take every week from nine to three. Enough treatments for up to 3 million patients are expected to be made available for eligible countries this year. Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe will be the first countries out of a total of 12 to provide the new regimen at a US$15 price thanks to funding from Unitaid, PEPFAR and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Read full story Source: Unitaid, 3 February 2021
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News ArticleShortages of oxygen are endangering the lives of more than half a million COVID-19 patients every day in the world’s poorest nations, new research has shown. Despite being vital for the effective treatment of people admitted to hospital with coronavirus, sustained access to oxygen has proven difficult in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) due to cost, infrastructure and logistical barriers. According to Unitaid, a global health agency, more than half a million people in LMICs currently need 1.1 million cylinders of oxygen per day, with 25 countries currently reporting surges in demand, the majority in Africa. Supplies of oxygen were already constrained prior to COVID-19 and have been exacerbated by the pandemic, Unitaid says. Read full story Source: The Independent, 25 February 2021
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Content ArticleFragile, conflict-affected and vulnerable (FCV) settings is a broad term describing a range of situations including humanitarian crises, protracted emergencies and armed conflicts. In FCV settings delivery of quality health services faces significant challenges, including disruption of routine health service organization and delivery systems, increased health needs, complex and unpredictable resourcing issues, and vulnerability to multiple public health crises. Despite the difficulty of addressing quality in FCV settings, the need is acute, given the significant health needs of the populations in such environments and the increasing numbers of people for whom FCV settings are home. WHO is working with Member States, the Global Health Cluster, and technical and academic partners to support action to address quality in FCV settings. Building on the foundations of the WHO National quality policy and strategy initiative, WHO has developed a technical document, “Quality of care in fragile, conflict-affected and vulnerable settings: taking action”. The document outlines a practical approach to action planning and implementation of quality interventions in FCV settings and is accompanied by a curated compendium of tools.
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