Florence Nightingale bicentenary 2020

Florence Nightingale "the Lady of the Lamp" was born on May 12, 1820, in Florence. This 2020 the worldwide celebrates of Florence Nightingale’s bicentenary. In her honour The World Health Organisation have named 2020 the Year of the Nurse and Midwife.

Despite family pressures to marry and live as a conventional wealthy woman, she considered her dedication to nursing to be a response to the call of God to care for the sick. Her success in radically lowering the death rate of wounded soldiers in the Crimean War led to society’s acceptance of her proposals for better sanitation and nutrition, accurate medical knowledge, and professionally trained nurses.

While Nightingale is best known worldwide for revolutionising nursing and healthcare through her campaigning for health reform, her far-reaching recommendations were based on impressive statistical work and popularised through pioneering data visualisation and her evidence-based approach to healthcare.

Florence Nigthtingale was the first female fellow in 1858 from Royal Statistical Society. The Significance magazine from Royal Statistical Society and American Statistical Association has published a special issue: Significance magazine, 2020, Volume 17, Issue 2: Florence Nightingale

More information:
Celebrating Nightingale 2020 Bicentenary
Mujeres con ciencia: Florence Nightingale (in spanish)
Florence Nightingale foundation
Guys and St Thomas Hospital

picture: Helping the wounded. Shutterstock/Everett Historical
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stay at home

 

Image: Milo Manara 2020
https://www.milomanara.it/?lang=en 
Milo Manara is an Italian comic book writer and artist.
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stay at home

photo: Sabadell (AHS, 1936...)
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What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG)

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is preventable.

Over the last two decades, the global community has come to recognise the profound impact of violence on the lives of women and girls. This fundamentally undermines their health and well-being, and stands as a barrier to women’s full participation in global development and the economic and civic life of their communities.

What works to prevent violence published last january 2020 a brief where evaluated the design and implementation of diferent interventions designed to reduce VAWG. The interventions were included in four different groups:

• Community activism approaches to shift harmful gender attitudes, roles and social norms
• Combined gender transformation and economic empowerment interventions
• Couples’ interventions and special populations
• Prevention of violence among and against children

The brief show many examples of well-designed, well-implemented interventions of different modalities. Ten core elements of the design and implementations have contributed to their success.

Eight elements related to the design of the interventions:

1. Rigorously planned, with a robust theory of change, rooted in knowledge of local context.
2. Address multiple drivers of VAW, such as gender inequity, poverty, poor communication and marital conflict
3. Especially in highly patriarchal contexts, work with women and men, and where relevant, families.
4. Based on theories of gender and social empowerment that view behaviour change as a collective rather than solely individual process, and foster positive interpersonal relations and gender equity
5. Use group-based participatory learning methods, for adults and children, that emphasise empowerment, critical reflection, communication and conflict resolution skills building.
6. Age-appropriate design for children with a longer time for learning and an engaging pedagogy such as sport and play
7. Carefully designed, user-friendly manuals and materials supporting all intervention components to accomplish their goals.
8. Integrate support for survivors of violence.

Two elements related to the implementation of the interventions:

1. Optimal intensity: duration and frequency of sessions and overall programme length enables time for reflection and experiential learning
2. Staff and volunteers are selected for their gender equitable attitudes and non-violence behaviour, and are thoroughly trained, supervised and supported.

What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls is an innovative global programme working in 13 countries across the world building the evidence base on What Works to prevent violence in low-middle income settings.

Access article (pdf) 2020 What works brief

photo: Vivian Maier (1980)
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clinical practice guidelines and the voice of patients

Clinical practice guidelines (CPG) are the user manuals of modern medicine. If the human body can suffer it, chances are there's a guideline for treating it, from burns and breaks to cancers and strokes. At their best, they provide gold-standard guidance to doctors: how to diagnose and treat a condition, what symptoms to watch for, what tests to order. But that's not always the reality. Clinicians are experts, but the patients with the disease are also experts. They're the ones living with it on a daily basis.

Guideline development could be unsatisfactory and unreliable. Because it so often fails to engage any patients or caregivers. Usually guidelines are developed without any input from the people who would actually experience them. Also, there is no consensus on what exactly patients and their representatives should be asked to do during CPG development. For example, should they be active members of guideline groups, or should patient input and preferences be shared only with clinicians in guideline groups. Moreover, there is little clarity about how guidelines should reflect patient-based evidence, or information generated by patients about different aspects of care, patient preferences, and care experience.

Rand (2019) in an interdisciplinary team of researchers, patient representatives from the Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy (PPMD) and clinicians developed the RAND/PPMD Patient-Centeredness Method (RPM) - a version of a Delphi method- with a online approach to engaging patients and their representatives in Clinicial Practice Guildelines.

The authors said that Duchenne was a good test case, because the disease is so rare, so complex, and the balance between treatment and quality of life is so precarious. but this method should be formally validated and tested in the context of other clinical conditions and compared to other ways of engaging patients in CPG development.

Open access article

photo: Moda ald carrer 1971. Joana Biarnés (1935-2018)
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Merry christmas and happy new year 2020

photo: Jordi Soldevila 2020
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poverty and health

Michaela Benzeval et al. published in 2014 in The Joseph Rowntree Foundation the report How does money influence health?

The study explores the association between income and health throughout the life course and within families. Researchers reviewed theories from 272 wide-ranging papers, most of which examined the complex interactions between people’s income and their health throughout their lives.

The research identifies four main ways money affects people’s wellbeing:

1. Material: Money buys goods and services that improve health. The more money families have, the better the goods they can buy.
2. Psychosocial: Managing on a low income is stressful. Comparing oneself to others and feeling at the bottom of the social ladder can be distressing, which can lead to biochemical changes in the body, eventually causing ill health.
3. Behavioural: For various reasons, people on low incomes are more likely to adopt unhealthy behaviours – smoking and drinking, for example – while those on higher incomes are more able to afford healthier lifestyles.
4. Reverse causation (poor health leads to low income): Health may affect income by preventing people from taking paid employment. Childhood health may also affect educational outcomes, limiting job opportunities and potential earnings.

These pathways are all likely to be important and interact across people’s lives in a complex web of links between income and health. The broader context is also important. Living on a low income in a country with a well-developed welfare state is unlikely to have the same health-damaging effects as living in one with poorer provision for healthcare and education.

Given this complexity of interconnection between people’s income and health, a broad approach to improving the health of those with limited resources is important.
Acces full report

photo: Toni Catany

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