Mobile Health for Ageing (mAgeing)

Health information, advice, and reminders delivered through mobile phones can encourage healthy behaviors and help older people to improve and maintain their intrinsic capacity. The WHO mobile health for Ageing (mAgeing) programme has been developed as one of the tools to support the implementation of WHO guidelines on community-level interventions to manage declines in intrinsic capacity – also known as the ICOPE Guidelines. The mAgeing programme can support routine care offered by health care professionals by supporting self-care and self-management.

The newly published Handbook helps countries develop, run, monitor, and evaluate the mAgeing programme within their own contexts, using basic technology ...

Integrated care for older people (ICOPE) implementation framework: guidance for systems and services

Alongside supporting community-level services, the Integrated Care for Older People (ICOPE) approach helps broader health and social care systems effectively respond to the diverse and complex needs of older people. The ICOPE Implementation Framework provides guidance for policy makers and programme managers to concretely assess and measure the capacity of services and systems to deliver integrated care at the community level.

The ICOPE Implementation Framework provides a score card to help assess the overall capacity of health and social care services and systems to deliver integrated care in community settings and support the development of ICOPE implementation action plans. There ...

Globalization and health equity: The impact of structural adjustment programs on developing countries

Among the many drivers of health inequities, this article focuses on important, yet insufficiently understood, international-level determinants: economic globalization and the organizations that spread market-oriented policies to the developing world. One such organization is the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which provides financial assistance to countries in economic trouble in exchange for policy reforms. Through its ‘structural adjustment programs,’ countries around the world have liberalized and deregulated their economies. We examine how policy reforms prescribed in structural adjustment programs explain variation in health equity between nations—approximated by health system access and neonatal mortality. Our empirical analysis uses an original dataset ...

Service Delivery Models to Maximize Quality of Life for Older People at the End of Life: A Rapid Review

In an era of unprecedented global aging, a key priority is to align health and social services for older populations in order to support the dual priorities of living well while adapting to a gradual decline in function. The aimed of this review was to provide a comprehensive synthesis of evidence regarding service delivery models that optimize the quality of life (QoL) for older people at the end of life across health, social, and welfare services worldwide.

Measuring patient-centred system performance: a scoping review of patient-centred care quality indicators

Patient-centred care (PCC) is one of the six dimensions of healthcare and was formally described by the Institute of Medicine in 2001 as healthcare that respects and responds to the preferences, needs and values of the individual patients throughout all healthcare decisions. PCC is an approach that has become central to policies and programming to improve healthcare efficiencies and address patient safety issues.
In that sense, The shift to the patient-centred care (PCC) model as a healthcare delivery paradigm calls for systematic measurement and evaluation. In an attempt to develop patient-centred quality indicators (PC-QIs), this study aimed to identify quality ...

Patient Engagement In Research: Early Findings From The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute

Charged with ensuring that research produces useful evidence to inform health decisions, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) requires investigators to engage patients and other health care stakeholders, such as clinicians and payers, in the research process. Many PCORI studies result in articles published in peer-reviewed journals that detail research findings and engagement’s role in research. To inform practices for engaging patients and others as research partners, this study analyzed 126 articles that described engagement approaches and contributions to research. PCORI projects engaged patients and others as consultants and collaborators in determining the study design, selecting study outcomes, tailoring ...

Person-centred Care Around the World

This directory of person-centred care organisations around the world was produced as part of an international environment scan of the field of person-centred care undertaken by Health Policy Partnership. This useful tool highlights the leading international centres working on similar aspects of person-centred care to the Health Foundation. The tool can help to identify person-centred care research, measurement and implementation ‘hot spots’ in different settings globally. The tool enables collaboration between those working on person-centred care by providing key information on the type of work being undertaken on person-centred care. Please share this tool with contacts and colleagues to encourage ...

Strengthening performance-based financing as a health system approach for quality improvement

Over the last decade, a significant reduction of maternal and child mortality has been achieved in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This is largely attributable to the substantial improvement in access to essential reproductive, maternal and child health services. However, in some countries, expansion of health services has not resulted in the expected mortality reduction. Low quality of care (QoC) is an important cause of this discrepancy, and it calls for putting quality improvement on the global health agenda. As an approach to enhance QoC in LMICs, performance-based financing (PBF), which incentivizes health providers based on predetermined indicators, has been ...

Developing more participatory and accountable institutions for health: identifying health system research priorities for the Sustainable Development Goal-era

Health policy and systems research (HPSR) is vital to guiding global institutions, funders, policymakers, activists and implementers in developing and enacting strategies to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.  The findings from this exercise identify HPSR funding priorities and future areas for evidence production and policy engagement.

Community health workers and accountability: reflections from an international “think-in”

Community health workers (CHWs) are frequently put forward as a remedy for lack of health system capacity, including challenges associated with health service coverage and with low community engagement in the health system, and expected to enhance or embody health system accountability. During a ‘think in’, held in June of 2017, a diverse group of practitioners and researchers discussed the topic of CHWs and their possible roles in a larger “accountability ecosystem.” While CHWs are often conceptualized as cogs in a mechanistic health delivery system, at the end of the day, CHWs are people embedded in families, communities, and the ...