Goodbye, but not farewell!
The November 2014 RHM journal was my last as RHM’s editor, and I’ve stayed on this year to support Shirin Heidari as the new editor during a transition period. My best wishes go with her! (Source: Reproductive Health Matters)
Source: Reproductive Health Matters - July 24, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Marge Berer Tags: Editorial Source Type: research
A Tribute to RHM Founding Editor, Marge Berer
(Source: Reproductive Health Matters)
Source: Reproductive Health Matters - July 24, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Source Type: research
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Everything you need to know about the Catholic Church and women can be ascertained from the front doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. There, six notable American Catholics are immortalized in statues set in the massive bronze doors of the entryway. St. Joseph and St. Patrick occupy the uppermost niches; the martyred Jesuit Isaac Jogues resides in the middle left panel. The three remaining statues occupying the middle right panel and the lowermost reaches of the door are of women. There is Kateri Tekakwiyha, a Mohawk-Algonquian convert to Catholicism who is best known for taking a vow of chastity and dying ...
Source: Reproductive Health Matters - July 24, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Patricia Miller Tags: BOOKSHELF Source Type: research
New actors, financial mechanisms and reformed aid reporting: What role for SRHR in post-2015 financing for development?
As governments around the world prepare to adopt a new development framework and supportive financial flows, the OECD Development Assistance Committee is exploring new ways of measuring and reporting on resource flows enabling development, including population assistance. These changes will affect the evidence base, discourse about and donor incentives related to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). They may lead to: i) reduction of grant aid in favour of instruments that are less suitable for SRHR, like loans and market-like instruments; ii) expansion of the range of development stakeholders to include those ...
Source: Reproductive Health Matters - July 14, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Karen Hoehn, Johanna Stratmann, Peter Schaffler Tags: FEATURE Source Type: research
Title, Table of Contents and Acknowledgments
(Source: Reproductive Health Matters)
Source: Reproductive Health Matters - May 1, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Source Type: research
Measuring accountability and quality of care in maternal health, Africa
The Evidence for Action (E4A) programme seeks to measure how political will can be measured, to what extent decision-makers have access to and use data, and how to measure change over time in these two key outcomes. Baseline monitoring data in six countries were gathered in 2012-2013 and data will be collected at mid-point (2014) and at end-point (2016), interviewing the same individuals wherever possible. One questionnaire assesses how far decision-makers have access to the right data at the right time and in a meaningful format, and how data are used to prioritise, plan and allocate resources. (Source: Reproductive Health Matters)
Source: Reproductive Health Matters - May 1, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Source Type: research
Evaluating capacity strengthening for health research in low- and middle-income countries
This study aimed to enhance understanding about the difficulties in evaluating health research capacity strengthening initiatives and to make recommendations about how to make such evaluations more effective. Through discussions and surveys of health research capacity strengthening funders, the researchers identified themes important to funders. The themes were then used to systematically analyse eighteen evaluation reports, written between 2000 and 2013, representing 12 evaluations ranging from individuals and institutions to national, regional and global levels. (Source: Reproductive Health Matters)
Source: Reproductive Health Matters - May 1, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Source Type: research
Using frameworks to set priorities for health policy
This article systematically reviewed a set of health policy papers on agenda setting and tests them against a specific priority-setting framework. The authors applied a commonly used Shiffman and Smith framework, which identified four conditions which would facilitate a priority issue being integrated into national policies and then acted on. The four conditions are actor power (the strength of the individuals and networks concerned with the issue), ideas (the ways in which those involved with the issue understand and portray it), context (environment in which actors operate) and issue characteristics. (Source: Reproductive Health Matters)
Source: Reproductive Health Matters - May 1, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Source Type: research
Financing adolescent health care for universal health coverage
This article assesses how far health care financing approaches that seek to provide universal coverage work for adolescents, by asking (and suggesting answers for) some important questions. Are adolescents adequately covered by a pooled financing arrangement (insurance- or tax-based)? If not, there may need to be a focus on increasing overall coverage and/or on measures that particularly target adolescents, including older adolescents. Do adolescents have to pay fees to use essential services, and if so, what is the impact of fees on their use of services? If this is a problem, exemptions could be a short-term measure. (So...
Source: Reproductive Health Matters - May 1, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Source Type: research
Sexual and reproductive health and rights in changing health systems
This paper explores what introduction of concepts of universal health coverage and care mean for sexual and reproductive health and rights, and for gender equity in health. Health system reform that does not address the core elements of the sexual and reproductive health and rights agenda will fail to meet important criteria of equality of access and affordability and will fail to meet the need for acceptability and quality in health services. Such reform could also remain weak on accountability. (Source: Reproductive Health Matters)
Source: Reproductive Health Matters - May 1, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Source Type: research
Need to close the men’s health gap for health equity
This commentary identifies policy targets and interventions that could address the largely ignored gender-based disparity in health, in which men tend to have worse health and lower life expectancy. In general, men’s multiple advantages do not translate into better health outcomes, in part because of notions of masculinity and the highly gendered nature of employment. These gender disparities are not properly addressed in the health policies and programmes of the major global health institutions. (Source: Reproductive Health Matters)
Source: Reproductive Health Matters - May 1, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Source Type: research
Addressing gender and power in sexuality and HIV education
This review of evaluation studies found that including gender and power content in sexuality and HIV education curricula increases the likelihood that they will be effective. Electronic and hand searches identified rigorous sexuality and HIV education evaluations from developed and developing countries published between 1990 and 2012. Of the 22 interventions that met the inclusion criteria, 10 addressed gender or power and 12 did not. Sixteen of the 22 studies were from high-income countries (14 of them from the US) and six from low- or middle-income countries. (Source: Reproductive Health Matters)
Source: Reproductive Health Matters - May 1, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Source Type: research
Grassroots legislation and sex work, Argentina
This paper discusses how sex workers from the sex worker organisation, AMMAR-Córdoba, Argentina developed proposals for new legislation through grassroots sex worker consultation. Involving sex workers in law making and monitoring is necessary because existing models have not only failed to improve social conditions for sex workers, but have negatively affected their vulnerability. In Argentina, the voluntary exchange of sexual services for money is not a crime, although provincial law in Córdoba forbids ‘disturbing or scandalous prostitution’. (Source: Reproductive Health Matters)
Source: Reproductive Health Matters - May 1, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Source Type: research
Adapting programmes that address homophobic stigma in different settings, South Africa
This paper explores how a community-based HIV prevention programme based in the peri-urban townships of Cape Town was ‘translated’ to peri-urban Johannesburg and considers the varying impact of homophobic stigma on HIV prevention programmes among men who have sex with men. The Ukwazana programme, in Cape Town’s peri-urban townships, worked in collaboration with a team of township volunteers or ‘ambassadors’, who were themselves men who have sex with other men, to uncover and confront community-level factors associated with sexual risk taking. (Source: Reproductive Health Matters)
Source: Reproductive Health Matters - May 1, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Source Type: research
Trafficking, sex work and HIV – conflicts in interpretation and response
This article focuses on the rights violations and public health harm caused by the conflation of sex work with trafficking. The UN definition of trafficking requires coercion and movement or harbouring of people for the aims of exploitation, and estimates of its prevalence vary widely. An operational definition of trafficking in sex work settings identifies two clear situations - minors being exploited or adults being coerced against their will. Surveillance data from peer-based interventions using such criteria identified trafficking in only 4-10% of women entering sex work in Mysore and West Bengal, India. (Source: Repro...
Source: Reproductive Health Matters - May 1, 2015 Category: Global & Universal Source Type: research
