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Showing results for tags 'Low income countries'.
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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 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 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 ArticleThe “WHO handbook for national quality policy and strategy” outlines an approach for the development of national policies and strategies to improve the quality of care. Such policy and strategy can help clarify the structures, roles and responsibilities within national quality efforts, support the institutionalisation of a culture of quality, and secure buy-in from health system leaders and stakeholders. The handbook is not a prescriptive process guide but is designed to support teams developing policies and strategies in this area, and very much recognizes the varied expertise, experience and resources available to countries. It outlines eight essential elements to be considered by teams developing national quality policy and strategy: national health goals and priorities; local definition of quality; stakeholder mapping and engagement; situational analysis; governance and organizational structure; improvement methods and interventions; health management information systems and data systems; quality indicators and core measures. The NQPS handbook was co-developed with countries each finding themselves at different stages of the development and execution of national quality policies and strategies and was informed by the review of a sample of more than 20 existing quality strategies across low-, middle- and high-income countries globally.
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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 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 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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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. -
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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. -
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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. -
EventuntilMedication-related harm accounts for up to half of the overall preventable harm in medical care. Patients in low- and middle-income countries are twice more likely to experience preventable medication harm than patients in high-income countries. Considering this huge burden of harm, “Medication Safety” has been selected as the theme for World Patient Safety Day 2022. To commemorate the day, WHO is organizing a Global Virtual Event, calling on all stakeholders to join efforts globally for “Medication Without Harm”. During the event, stakeholders will discuss medication safety issues within the strategic framework of the WHO Global Patient Safety Challenge: Medication Without Harm, including 1) Patients and the public, 2) Health and care workers, 3) Medicines, and 4) Systems and practices of medication. Interpretations will be available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Register for the webinar Save the date-flyer_Global Virtual Event WPSD 2022_15 September 2022.pdf
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Content ArticleIn this letter to The Lancet, Thomas Cueni, Director General of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations argues that the need to focus on equitable rollout of vaccines in the event of a future pandemic is a key global health priority. He proposes that Governments, pharma companies and other stakeholders should focus on the challenges that led to the inequitable rollout of vaccines, which he identifies as vaccine nationalism and need for more diverse manufacturing. He highlights an industry proposal for equitable response to future pandemics supported by vaccine manufacturers and biotechnologies. the proposal involves manufacturers setting aside a percentage of pandemic tools for allocation to susceptible populations in low-income countries.
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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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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 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 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 ArticleHealth systems in low and middle income countries (LMIC) are increasingly pluralistic, involving a wide mix of public, not-for-profit and for-profit providers. Regulation should be a key foundation of the Government's stewardship role of these heterogeneous facilities, but performance of this function is generally weak, with serious consequence for patient safety and quality of care. There 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. This randomised controlled trial is assessing the impact of a set of innovative regulatory interventions in public and private facilities in three Kenyan counties. These comprise the use of the Joint Health Inspections Checklist (JHIC), which synthesises the areas covered by all the regulatory Boards and Councils; increased inspection frequency; risk-based inspections where warnings, sanctions and time to re-inspection depend on inspection scores; and display of regulatory results outside facilities. The KePSIE trial will provide a rigorous quantitative assessment of these regulatory strategies. The results are expected to make an important contribution to the limited evidence base on regulation and regulatory reform. The findings will be of substantial benefit to those concerned with regulatory reform and the improvement of quality and safety more generally in Kenya and other LMIC settings.
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Content ArticleThis report by the Access to Medicine Foundation looks at how the pharmaceuticals industry can help tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR) by improving access to medicines. It sets out how the unstable antibiotic market, with its fragile supply chains and tough market conditions, hinders the development of robust models that would allow medications to be more easily distributed and accessed. It features six case studies where companies and their partners are using a combination of access strategies to cut through the complexity and address access at a local level.
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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 ArticlePerceptions of care work as low skilled continue to persist, despite the pandemic highlighting just how vital care workers are. In recent years there has been increased debate around the ‘professionalisation’ of this staff group, which generally refers to the creation of a statutory register of staff and their professional regulation. This new Nuffield Trust report reviews what the evidence shows about the professionalisation of care workers in other countries.
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Content ArticleDespite global consensus that access to pharmaceuticals as a lifesaving commodity is a fundamental human right, 2 billion people globally still lack access to medicines. In this blog, Karrar Karrar, Access to Medicines Adviser at Save the Children, looks at why weak regulatory systems are a major patient safety issue in low- and middle-income countries. He highlights that lack of regulatory capacity results in falsified, substandard and fake medicines making their way into local pharmacies and hospitals. It also delays patient access to new medicines due to lengthy processing times. Karrar argues that governments must prioritise investments in strengthening national regulatory systems and increase cross-country collaboration to strengthen regional and global regulatory networks and systems.
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Content Article
This is part of our series of Patient Safety Spotlight interviews, where we talk to people working for patient safety about their role and what motivates them. Tony talks to us about making patient safety everyone’s responsibility, the importance of open communication and how his understanding of different global health systems has broadened his perspective on what matters in patient care.
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