Community engagement for successful COVID-19 pandemic response: 10 lessons from Ebola outbreak responses in Africa

During public health emergencies, such as the current COVID-19 Public Health Emergency of International Concern, communities are often poorly involved in the planning and implementation of interventions, yet their commitment is fundamental to control outbreaks. Given the experience of responding to Ebola epidemics in Africa, it is imperative that communities must be accountable to the response to COVID-19. Health actors and authorities must co-construct solutions to address COVID-19 with community leaders and communities. 

Effects of Training Health Workers in Integrated Management of Childhood Illness on Quality of Care for Under-5 Children in Primary Healthcare Facilities in Afghanistan

Neonatal and infant mortality in Afghanistan has decreased considerably since 1990. Despite this, infant morbidity and mortality remains among the highest in the world. In relation to this, the integrated training in the primary care of health workers regarding the main diseases that affect children is an effective strategy.
This article shows the results related to the quality of care for children under 5 years of age, from the training of health workers.

Connecting communities to primary care: a qualitative study on the roles, motivations and lived experiences of community health workers in the Philippines

Community health workers (CHWs) are an important cadre of the primary health care (PHC) workforce in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The Philippines was an early adopter of the CHW model for the delivery of PHC. This study aims to address this gap by examining the lived experiences and roles of BHWs in urban and rural sites in the Philippines.

Exploring barriers and facilitators to integrated hypertension-HIV management in Ugandan HIV clinics using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR)

Persons living with HIV receiving antiretroviral therapy have increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Integration of services for hypertension, the primary cardiovascular risk factor, into HIV clinics is recommended in Uganda. The investigator´s prior work was demonstrated multiple gaps in implementation of integrated Hypertension care along the HIV treatment cascade. In this study, they sought to explore barriers to and facilitators of integrating Hypertension screening and treatment into HIV clinics in Eastern Uganda.

Towards an Integrated Care Organisation from a CEO Perspective

Many experimental projects towards Person-Centred Care (PCC) are successful in the early stages, but founder when the attempt is made to scale them up to encompass the whole organisation. This case study therefore focusses on one manager’s attempts to extend the successes of a preliminary project ‘Etxean Ondo’ that aimed to provide adequate support for the elderly living at home or in nursing homes, as well as for their families and care professionals.

Collaborative Experience Success Stories in Integrated Care of Older People: A Narrative Analysis

Inter-organisational collaboration is crucial in the care of older people, as is the development of integrated care. Storytelling in organisations is one way of understanding how to achieve successful collaboration. This article provides insights into the ways in which storytelling in collaborative experiences contributes to a collective identity instrumental in the successful collaborations involved in integrated care for older people.

From Crisis to Coordination: Challenges and Opportunities for Integrated Care posed by the COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 has accentuated the stark reality that, despite the efforts of the past 20 years, there remains a continued failure to embrace integrated care systems. It has also demonstrated how quickly systems, organisations and individuals can change, if they must. The uptake in telehealth, eHealth and other technological support systems is unprecedented, even though only a couple of months ago this was unthinkable on a broad scale in many countries. The swiftness of multi-disciplinary teams coming together to find flexible solutions to the day-today challenges during lockdown has shown how we can achieve effective communication and collaboration.

COVID-19 care in India: the course to self-reliance

Many times we think of the integration of health systems as an urgent need. However, there are cases (and realities) where it is necessary to centralize to homogenize the action in the face of a crisis such as the SARS-CoV2 pandemic. The public health response to COVID-19 in India has been highly centralised, resulting in a homogenous strategy applied across a sixth of the world’s population.

Integrated Care for Older People and the Implementation in the INSPIRE Care Cohort

Proposal based on the Integrated Care Manual for the Elderly (ICOPE),  has been developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to meet the health needs and demands of rapidly aging populations around the world. The Manual helps to set person-centered goals and integrate approaches at the system, service, and clinical levels. The care plan can include multiple interventions to manage declining capacity, provide social and support, develop self-management skills, and support caregivers.

The main objective of the INSPIRE study is to build a Bio-resource Research Platform for Healthy Ageing gathering biological, clinical and digital resources in order to identify markers ...

Empowering Better End-of-Life Dementia Care (EMBED-Care): A mixed methods protocol to achieve integrated person-centred care across settings

It is known that the number of people with dementia continues to increase in the world. We also know that people with dementia live to advanced stages of the disease, so they will require comprehensive palliative care. The aim objetive of this work, is to promote a “step change” in care for people with dementia and their carers to enable delivery of timely person-centred care, to identify unmet needs and improve outcomes, including comfort and qualitive of life, towards end of life. Each of six-interdependent work streams (WSs) will deliver new knowledge and sequentially build a complex intervention to improve ...