Similarities and differences in managing the Covid-19 crisis and climate change risk

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (10) ◽  
pp. 2597-2614
Author(s):  
Maria Laura Ruiu ◽  
Massimo Ragnedda ◽  
Gabriele Ruiu
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Risk Communication ◽  
Action Plan ◽  
World Health Organisation ◽  
World Health ◽  
Communication Model ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Similarities And Differences

Purpose This paper investigates both similarities and differences between two global threats represented by climate change (CC) and Covid-19 (CV). This will help understand the reasons behind the recognition of the CV as a pandemic that requires global efforts, whereas efforts to tackle climate change still lack such urgency. This paper aims to answer to the following questions: What are the elements that make CV restrictions acceptable by both the public and policymakers? and What are the elements that make CC restrictions not acceptable? Design/methodology/approach This paper analyses the situation reports released by the World Health Organisation between the 11th of March (declaration of pandemic) and the 22nd of April, and their associated documents such as the Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan (WHO), the Risk Communication and Community Engagement Action Plan (WHO) and its updated version (WHO) and the Handbook for public health capacity-building (WHO). The analysis ends one week after President Trump’s announcement to suspend US funding to WHO (Fedor and Manson, 2020) and his support to public demonstrations against restrictions. Findings The application of the second stage of the “Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication” model identifies five lessons that can be learned from this comparison. These relate to the necessity to simultaneously warn (about the severity of a threat) and reassure (by suggesting specific courses of action) the public; the need for multilevel collaboration that integrates collective and individual actions; the capacity to present cohesive messages to the public; the risk of politicisation and commodification of the issue that might undermine global efforts to tackle the threat; and the capacity to trigger individual responses through the promotion of self-efficacy. Originality/value This paper identifies both similarities and differences between CC and CV managements to understand why the two threats are perceived and tackled in different ways. The analysis of official documents released by both the World Health Organisation and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate CV outbreak as a crisis, whereas climate change is still anchored to the status of a future-oriented risk.

scholarly journals Reducing the Risk of Cognitive Decline and Dementia: WHO Recommendations

2022 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neerja Chowdhary ◽  
Corrado Barbui ◽  
Kaarin J. Anstey ◽  
Miia Kivipelto ◽  
Mariagnese Barbera ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Decline ◽  
Risk Reduction ◽  
Social Care ◽  
Guideline Development ◽  
Action Plan ◽  
World Health Organisation ◽  
World Health ◽  
Public Health Response ◽  
Health And Social Care ◽  
The World

With population ageing worldwide, dementia poses one of the greatest global challenges for health and social care in the 21st century. In 2019, around 55 million people were affected by dementia, with the majority living in low- and middle-income countries. Dementia leads to increased costs for governments, communities, families and individuals. Dementia is overwhelming for the family and caregivers of the person with dementia, who are the cornerstone of care and support systems throughout the world. To assist countries in addressing the global burden of dementia, the World Health Organisation (WHO) developed the Global Action Plan on the Public Health Response to Dementia 2017–2025. It proposes actions to be taken by governments, civil society, and other global and regional partners across seven action areas, one of which is dementia risk reduction. This paper is based on WHO Guidelines on risk reduction of cognitive decline and dementia and presents recommendations on evidence-based, multisectoral interventions for reducing dementia risks, considerations for their implementation and policy actions. These global evidence-informed recommendations were developed by WHO, following a rigorous guideline development methodology and involved a panel of academicians and clinicians with multidisciplinary expertise and representing geographical diversity. The recommendations are considered under three broad headings: lifestyle and behaviour interventions, interventions for physical health conditions and specific interventions. By supporting health and social care professionals, particularly by improving their capacity to provide gender and culturally appropriate interventions to the general population, the risk of developing dementia can be potentially reduced, or its progression delayed.

scholarly journals Modelling and analysis of COVID-19 epidemic in India

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alok Tiwari
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Doubling Time ◽  
Single Case ◽  
World Health Organisation ◽  
Public Health Emergency ◽  
Positive Case ◽  
World Health ◽  
The Public ◽  
First Case ◽  
The World

ABSTRACTCOVID-19 epidemic is declared as the public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organisation in the second week of March 2020. This disease originated from China in December 2019 has already caused havoc around the world, including India. The first case in India was reported on 30th January 2020, with the cases crossing 6000 on the day paper was written. Complete lockdown of the nation for 21 days and immediate isolation of infected cases are the proactive steps taken by the authorities. For a better understanding of the evolution of COVID-19 in the country, Susceptible-Infectious-Quarantined-Recovered (SIQR) model is used in this paper. It is predicted that actual infectious population is ten times the reported positive case (quarantined) in the country. Also, a single case can infect 1.55 more individuals of the population. Epidemic doubling time is estimated to be around 4.1 days. All indicators are compared with Brazil and Italy as well. SIQR model has also predicted that India will see the peak with 22,000 active cases during the last week of April followed by reduction in active cases. It may take complete July for India to get over with COVID-19.

Developing a Skilled Workforce: Impact of a Postgraduate Programme on Dementia Knowledge, Attitudes and Training Needs

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
C. Scerri
Keyword(s):  
Action Plan ◽  
World Health Organisation ◽  
World Health ◽  
Public Health Response ◽  
The Public ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Healthcare Profession ◽  
Health Response ◽  
Health And Social Care ◽  
Global Action

In 2017, the World Health Organisation (WHO) launched the global action plan on the public health response to dementia. Among its many aims, the plan recommends the need to create a knowledge-based healthcare profession that delivers evidence-based, culturally-appropriate and human rights-orientated health and social care, including long-term services for individuals with dementia.

Global lessons from Ebola crisis may be ignored

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Health Services ◽  
World Health Organisation ◽  
World Health ◽  
Health Priorities ◽  
Local Health ◽  
International Organisations ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The World ◽  
National Governments

Subject Lessons from the Ebola crisis. Significance The Ebola epidemic in West Africa caught national governments and international organisations off-guard. As the epidemic begins to abate in the affected countries, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has begun an internal process to learn lessons for future global health emergencies. However, many of the required responses were well-known before the Ebola outbreak but ignored. Shifting entrenched political attitudes will be a challenge. Impacts Popular distrust of local health services continues to mar comprehensive detection of Ebola infections in affected countries. Re-building local health services will be distorted if the Ebola crisis dominates planning over long-term health priorities. However, donors tend to prefer orientation towards disease-specific programmes and interventions over strengthening health systems.

Telehealth use will suffer global divergence for years

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
World Health Organisation ◽  
Personal Health Information ◽  
World Health ◽  
Personal Health ◽  
Virtual Technology ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Industry Collaboration ◽  
The World ◽  
Regulatory Bodies

Subject Telehealth outlook. Significance The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines telehealth as involving the use of telecommunications and virtual technology to deliver healthcare outside of traditional facilities. Telehealth is becoming a critical tool for addressing health inequalities but how it is accessed varies widely between developed and developing countries. Impacts Rural parts of developing countries will lag the most on telehealth due to infrastructure gaps. Greater cross-industry collaboration is needed on privacy safeguards for personal health information. Developing-country health systems will face pressure to develop accreditation and regulatory bodies specifically for telehealth.

scholarly journals How did the UK government face the global COVID-19 pandemic?

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamiris Cristhina Resende ◽  
Marco Antonio Catussi Paschoalotto ◽  
Stephen Peckham ◽  
Claudia Souza Passador ◽  
João Luiz Passador
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Action Plan ◽  
World Health Organisation ◽  
World Health ◽  
Prevention Measures ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
First Case ◽  
The World ◽  
Uk Government ◽  
The Uk

Abstract This paper aims to analyse the coordination and cooperation in Primary Health Care (PHC) measures adopted by the British government against the spread of the COVID-19. PHC is clearly part of the solution founded by governments across the world to fight against the spread of the virus. Data analysis was performed based on coordination, cooperation, and PHC literature crossed with documentary analysis of the situation reports released by the World Health Organisation and documents, guides, speeches and action plans on the official UK government website. The measures adopted by the United Kingdom were analysed in four periods, which helps to explain the courses of action during the pandemic: pre-first case (January 22- January 31, 2020), developing prevention measures (February 1 -February 29, 2020), first Action Plan (March 1- March 23, 2020) and lockdown (March 24-May 6, 2020). Despite the lack of consensus in essential matters such as Brexit, the nations in the United Kingdom are working together with a high level of cooperation and coordination in decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic.

scholarly journals Clinical trial search portal launched

2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (19) ◽  
Author(s):  
Collective Editorial team
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Trial ◽  
Clinical Trials ◽  
World Health Organisation ◽  
Target Audience ◽  
World Health ◽  
The Public ◽  
Health Practitioners ◽  
The World ◽  
Search For Information ◽  
International Initiative

On 4 May 2007, the Clinical Trial Search Portal (http://www.who.int/trialsearch) was launched. An international initiative led by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the portal aims to ease the rapid search for information about clinical trials worldwide. It is open to the public, but its target audience is health practitioners and researchers.

scholarly journals The Structure of Tweets about Vaccine Safety Between Health Organizations, Experts and the Public: Analyzing Risk Communication Conversations

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
David Manheim ◽  
Anat Gesser-Edelsburg
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Risk Communication ◽  
Vaccine Safety ◽  
World Health ◽  
Structure Theory ◽  
Health Organizations ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Conversational Structure

Abstract This paper considers how health education organizations in the World Health Organization's Vaccine Safety Network (VSN) use Twitter to communicate about vaccines with the public, and whether they answer questions and engage in conversations. Almost no research in public health, to our knowledge, has explored conversational structure on social media among posts sent by different accounts. Starting with 1,017,176 tweets by relevant users, we constructed two corpuses of multi-tweet conversations. The first was 1,814 conversations that included VSN members directly, while the second was 2,283 conversations mentioning vaccines or vaccine denialism. The tweets and user metadata was then analyzed using an adaptation of Rhetorical Structure Theory. In the studied data, VSN members tweeted 12,677 times within conversations, compared to their 37,587 lone tweets. Their conversations were shorter than those in the comparison corpus (P < 0.0001), and they were involved in fewer multilogues (P < 0.0001). We also see that while there is diversity among organizations, most were tied to the pre-social-media broadcast model. In the future, they should try to converse more, rather than tweet more, and embrace best-practices in risk-communication.

North America's cannabis sector has enormous scope

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World Health Organisation ◽  
World Health ◽  
Content Type ◽  
North American Market ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Working Age ◽  
Recreational Marijuana ◽  
Drugs And Crime ◽  
Recreational Use

Subject The US cannabis market. Significance The World Health Organisation reports that cannabis is the most widely used psychoactive controlled substance across the world. Indeed, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that in 2014, 182.5 million working-age people used recreational marijuana. North America is the world's largest market for marijuana, cannabis's smoked herbal form, and legalisation for both medicinal and recreational use is building momentum, rapidly creating a massive new industry. Impacts The share of the global population using cannabis is around 3.8%, translating into a North American market of at least 18 million users. Canada is legalising cannabis next year while 29 US states and the District of Columbia have legalised medical or recreational use. Full US legalisation remains uncertain as the federal prohibition remains in place.

The privatisation of healthcare system in Bangladesh

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Redwanur Rahman
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Healthcare System ◽  
Health Sector ◽  
World Health ◽  
Healthcare Sector ◽  
Public Healthcare ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
The Government

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that triggered the privatisation of Bangladesh’s health sector. Design/methodology/approach This study follows systematic reviews in its undertaking and is based on an extensive review of both published and unpublished documents. Different search engines and databases were used to collect the materials. The study takes into account of various research publications, journal articles, government reports, policy and planning documents, relevant press reports/articles, and reports and discussion papers from the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Findings While Bangladesh’s healthcare sector has undergone an increasing trend towards privatisation, this move has limited benefits on the overall improvement in the health of the people of Bangladesh. The public sector should remain vital, and the government must remobilise it to provide better provision of healthcare. Research limitations/implications The paper focusses only on the public policy aspect of privatisation in healthcare of a country. Practical implications The paper examines the issue of privatisation of healthcare and concludes that privatisation not only makes services more expensive, but also diminishes equity and accountability in the provision of services. The study, first, makes a spate of observations on improving public healthcare resources, which can be of value to key decision makers and stakeholders in the healthcare sector. It also discourages the move towards private sector interventions. Originality/value This study is an independent explanation of a country’s healthcare system. Lesson learned from this study could also be used for developing public policy in similar socio-economic contexts.

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