Bulletin of the World Health Organization

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Julie Makani talks to Gary Humphreys about the need for guidance and policy to reflect developments in treatment of sickle cell disease.

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A toolkit for emergency care is being adapted for use across a wide range of countries and is having a significant impact on outcomes. Gary Humphreys reports.

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PROBLEM: Violence against women is a global health problem. Effectively preventing such violence requires locally adapted strategies. APPROACH: The World Health Organization in Indonesia, in collaboration with United Nations (UN) Population Fund, UN Women, United Nations Children's Fund, United Nations Development Programme and Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, launched capacity-building initiatives to introduce RESPECT as an evidence-based framework to address violence against women...

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The first version of the World Health Organization Model list of essential medicines contained 186 medicines in 1977 and has evolved to include 502 medicines in 2023. Over time, different articles criticized the methods and process for decisions; however, the list holds global relevance as a model list to over 150 national lists. Given the global use of the model list, reflecting on its future role is imperative to understand how the list should evolve and respond to the needs of Member States. In 2023, the model list Expert Committee recommended the World Health Organization (WHO) to initiate a process to revise the procedures for updating the model list and the criteria guiding decisions...

PROBLEM: Many national child health guidelines in Malawi, Nigeria and South Africa are outdated and score poorly on rigorous methods and stakeholder participation. APPROACH: In line with the World Health Organization's (WHO) emphasis on local guideline contextualization, the Global Evidence-Local Adaptation (GELA) project supported multistakeholder processes to adapt evidence-informed recommendations for child health in Malawi, Nigeria and South Africa. The GELA project team convened national steering groups, which conducted structured, iterative priority-setting exercises to identify priority topics...

The World Health Organization (WHO) plays an important role in developing evidence-based and ethically sound guidelines to assist health workers, programme managers and policy-makers, particularly in countries with limited capacities to create their own. While the development of these guidelines follows rigorous methods, contextualizing recommendations is often necessary to ensure their applicability, feasibility and acceptability at the country level. The adaptation and adoption of global guidelines should happen in a transparent, systematic and participatory manner to maintain credibility while ensuring the ownership necessary for implementation...

OBJECTIVE: To compare uptake of the voluntary Health Star Rating front-of-pack nutrition labelling system with uptake of a mostly mandatory country-of-origin label in Australia over a similar period. METHODS: We used data on numbers and proportions of products carrying health stars and country-of-origin labelling recorded annually between 2015 and 2023 through surveys of four large Australian food retailers. We determined the proportion of products with health stars and country-of-origin labels for each year by dividing the number of products carrying each label by the total number eligible to carry that label...

PROBLEM: At the beginning of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, reliable, globally applicable recommendations for safe and continuous school operations were lacking. APPROACH: In October 2020, the German Association of Scientific Medical Societies' task force for COVID-19 guidelines and public health researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München initiated the rapid development of a living evidence- and consensus-based guideline to reduce severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 transmission in schools...

In recent decades, considerable advances have been made in assuring the safety of blood transfusion and organ transplantation. However, with the increasing movement of medical products of human origin across international boundaries, there is a need to enhance global norms and governance. These products, which include blood, organs, tissues, cells, human milk and faecal microbiota, are today crucial for health care but they also pose unique risks due to their human origin, such as disease transmission and graft failure...

PROBLEM: The Malaita and Western provinces in Solomon Islands had low routine immunization coverage due to disruptions in health services caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in early 2022. APPROACH: The country introduced the World Health Organization (WHO) Reaching Every District (RED) approach in 2002. Between July and September 2022, we strengthened supportive supervision, monitoring and use of data for decision-making, especially for microplanning and re-establishing outreach to prioritized areas...

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The normative role of the World Health Organization (WHO) involves creating evidence-based, principled guidelines to guide its Member States in making well-informed public health decisions. While these guidelines often need to be adapted to ensure contextual relevance, foster better implementation and adherence, adapting existing guidelines is more efficient than creating new ones. Here we describe the adaptation of the WHO coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) living guideline on pharmacological interventions for the Caribbean using the grading of recommendations, assessment, development and evaluation (GRADE)-ADOLOPMENT method...

OBJECTIVE: To assess the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on protests by health workers. METHODS: We conducted an interrupted time series analysis of data from 159 countries for 2 years before and after the World Health Organization classified COVID-19 as a pandemic in March 2020, thus between 2018 and 2022. We produced models examining two main outcomes: (i) the total weekly number of health worker protests globally; and (ii) the number of countries with one or more health worker protests in a given week...

OBJECTIVE: To develop a framework and index for measuring universal health coverage (UHC) at the district level in India and to assess progress towards UHC in the districts. METHODS: We adapted the framework of the World Health Organization and World Bank to develop a district-level UHC index (UHC d ). We used routinely collected health survey and programme data in India to calculate UHC d for 687 districts from geometric means of 24 tracer indicators in five tracer domains: reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health; infectious diseases; noncommunicable diseases; service capacity and access; and financial risk protection...