IPCHS. Integrated People-Centred Health Services

Publications

This growing repository holds WHO documents, scientific publications, policy documents, implementation reports, presentations and others with information and insights about integrated people-centred health services. Share your publication by clicking “Add publication”.

April 2, 2018 Africa

The complex challenge of providing patient-centred perinatal healthcare in rural Uganda:A qualitative enquiry

Increasing research and reflections on quality of healthcare across the perinatal period slowly propels the global community to lobby for improved standards of quality perinatal healthcare, especially in low-and- middle- income countries. 

The purpose of this qualitative study was to obtain a deeper understanding of how interpersonal dimensions of the quality of care relate to real-life experiences of perinatal care, in a resource-contrained local health system. 

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April 2, 2018 Africa

Ghana's community-based primary health care: Why women and children are ‘disadvantaged’ by its implementation

Policy analysis on why women and children in low- and middle- income settings are still disadvantaged by access to appropiate care despite Primary Health Care (PHC) programmes implementation is limited. Drawing on the street- level bureaucracy theory, this article explored how and why frontline providers (FLP) actions on their own and in interaction with health system factors shape Ghana´s community-based PHC implementation to the disadvantage of women and children accessing and using health services. 

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April 2, 2018 Eastern Mediterranean

Improving the Distribution of Rural Health Houses Using Elicitation and GIS in Khuzestan Province (the Southwest of Iran)

Rural health houses constitute a major provider of some primary health services in the villages of Iran. Given the challenges of providing health services in rural areas, health houses should be established based on the criteria of health networks systems (HNSs). The value of these criteria and their precedence over others have not yet been thoroughly investigated. The present study was conducted to propose a model for improving the distribution of rural health houses in HNSs

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March 25, 2018 Africa

Integration of community home based care programmes within national primary health care revitalisation strategies in Ethiopia, Malawi, South-Africa and Zambia: a comparative assessment

In 2008, the WHO facilitated the primary health care (PHC) revitalisation agenda. The purpose was to stregthen African health systems in order to address communicable and non-communicable diseases. The aim of this article was to assess the position of civil society-led community home based care programmes (CHBC), which serve the needs of patients with HIV, within this agenda. It examined how their roles and place in health systems evolved, and the prospects for these programmes in national policies and strategies to revitalise PHC, as new health care demand arise. 

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March 25, 2018 Africa

The perceived impact of family physicians on the district health system in South Africa: a cross-sectional survey

The 2008 World Health Report "Primary Health Care-Now More Than Ever" defines strong Primary Health Care (PHC) systems as those systems which offer first contact care that is patient-centred with an orientation to the patient´s family and community context, embedded in a service that is comprehensive, integrated, continuos, and community-orientated, and in which patient-care is well co-ordinated. This report warned against oversimplified approaches to PHC in developing countries, which only focus on priority deseases or rely on unsupported health workers who are poorly equipped for the complexity of PHC. The World Health Assembly supports the report´s recommendation that ...

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March 19, 2018 Europe

Communities and health

The role of communities in improving health is receiving increasing, and long overdue, attention in health policy and practice. Stronger recognition of the role communities can play and greater involvement are needed if there is to be a successful move to population health systems. As part of this shift in focus, sustainability and transformation partnerships and integrated care systems need to take the role communities can play in improving and sustaining good health seriously. 

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March 19, 2018 Europe

Reimagining community services: making the most of our assets

The purpose of this research was to understand the current state of community services and to explore how the health and care systems needs to change to enable these to meet the needs of the population now and in the future

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March 7, 2018 Europe

Identification of influencing factors and strategies to improve communication between general practitioners and community nurses: a qualitative focus group study

As the number of patients with complex healthcare needs grows, inter-professionaal collaboration between primary care professionals must be constantly optimized. General practitioners (GPs) and community nurses (CNs) are key professions in primary care; however, poor GP-CN communication is common, and research into the factors influencing its quality is limited. 

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March 1, 2018 South-East Asia

The effect of community health worker–led education on women’s health and treatment– seeking: A cluster randomised trial and nested process evaluation in Gujarat, India

A community-based health insurance scheme operated by the Self-Employed Women´s Association in Gujarat, India reported that the leading reasons for inpatient hospitalisation claims by its members were diarrhoea, fever and hysterectomy- the latter at the average age of 37. This claims pattern raised concern regarding potentially unnecessary hospitalisation amongst low-income women. 

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Feb. 19, 2018 Americas

Health Services Research Spending and Healthcare System Impact

The challenges associated with translating health services and policy research evidence into practice are many and long-standing. Indeed, those challenges have themselves spawned new areas of research, including knowledge translation and implementation science. These sub-disciplines have increase our understanding of the critical success factors associated with the uptake of research evidence into (system) practice. In that regard, building on Canada´s recent Strategy for Patient Oriented Research would seem to offer consideravle promise. The "modest" proposals offered by Thakkar and Sulivan seem less likely to bear fruit. 

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