Resolve To Save Lives’ Post

Today is Global Handwashing Day. Hand hygiene is important for everyone and it’s an essential component of infection prevention and control. We’re working with partners to protect health care workers and reduce avoidable infections by improving hand hygiene in health facilities, which saves about $16 in expenditures for every $1 invested, according to a recent WHO report. #GlobalHandwashingDay

Our collaborative surveillance projects use real-time information to keep people safe from health threats. Using multi-sectoral, integrated data, we work with partners to optimize the systems, processes, and people needed to make decisions before and during public health emergencies.   Through our work, countries are able to take action to detect and respond better and faster to new public health threats, including those that have been exacerbated by climate change, and prevent outbreaks from ever occurring.   Find out more about our collaborative surveillance work here:

“The application of 7-1-7 in Kenya is giving our public health workers more confidence in approaching response to public health emergencies.” —Dr. Victoria Kanana, Kenya National Public Health Institute During a recent outbreak of Rift Valley Fever, #Kenya used the 7-1-7 target to identify barriers to an effective response and quickly get resources to the affected region.

Heading to the World Health Summit? Join our very own Amanda McClelland for a panel discussion exploring community-centered preparedness, response and resilience. Organized by our colleagues at the World Health Organization and Robert Koch Institute, the event promises to be a thought-provoking and fruitful discussion. #WHS2024 Watch the discussion at the link below on Monday. (Note: Discussion can be streamed in browser, no download required.) https://lnkd.in/gn7e8-BU

An epidemic-ready primary health care (ERPHC) system is one that can prevent, detect, and respond to outbreaks while maintaining essential health services. An ERPHC system can find cases quickly, manage them safely and cope with the increased demands they bring.    Through our ERPHC initiative, we’re partnering with primary health care facilities to ensure they are “epidemic-ready”—by strengthening relationships between facilities and the communities they serve and by training and mentoring health care workers to prevent, detect, and manage outbreaks while protecting themselves and others.   Find out more about ERPHC here:

It’s been a productive few weeks! Our staff, Hani M. and Reantha Pillay, have served as external experts for Joint External Evaluations taking place in Kenya, South Africa and South Sudan, providing support to assess country capacities to prevent, detect and respond to public health risks. We were honored to join our World Health Organization African Region colleagues and in-country partners for these important mission weeks, which will allow the countries to identify areas of success and opportunities for improvement. Looking forward to our ongoing partnership.

Congratulations to our partners at the Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI) in Uganda on their recent launch of the Clinical Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (cIDSR) training! cIDSR is a selection of free, mobile-optimized courses that help frontline health care workers recognize, report and contain infectious disease outbreaks, which we developed in partnership with HealthLearn. You can read more about how cIDSR is training health care workers to prevent epidemics in our latest web feature: https://lnkd.in/g6RpqXYZ

High blood pressure is a deadly condition that often goes untreated even though it kills 20 people every minute and is the leading risk factor for heart disease. This #WorldHeartDay, we call on governments and policymakers to initiate national cardiovascular disease action plans that prioritize high blood pressure control. Here are three countries that have taken promising steps towards ending preventable deaths from heart disease using the WHO HEARTS program on a large scale.