[EQ] Investing Wisely in Child Survival with the Lives Saved Tool (LiST)

Investing Wisely in Child Survival with the Lives Saved Tool (LiST)

March 29, 2010 - Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

 

LiST Website: http://www.jhsph.edu/dept/ih/IIP/list/index.html

“….The International Journal of Epidemiology published a special issue today chronicling the development and recent use of the Lives Saved Tool (LiST)—a user-friendly computer program that helps donor agencies and governments make investments in child survival programs for maximum impact. LiST was developed in the Child Health Epidemiology Research Group (CHERG) with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

The special issue of International Journal of Epidemiology was edited by Neff Walker, PhD, a senior scientist with the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and is now available online (http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/vol39/suppl_1/ ).

Millions of mothers and children die every year because they do not receive basic care. While it is currently impossible to provide comprehensive care to all of them, LiST shows what interventions have the potential to avert the most deaths. The computer program can provide information for specific countries and regions based on estimates of disease burden and intervention effectiveness. The articles in this issue present the underlying modeling approach used to develop LiST, reviews of specific intervention effectiveness incorporated into the program, and examples of LiST predictions compared to observed results. 

 

Years of work by the CHERG, an independent reference group for UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO), provide the foundation for calculations performed by LiST, and many of the articles included in the supplement address the effectiveness of specific interventions upon which estimates are based….”

Lives Saved Tool (LiST)

A computer-based tool that allows users to set up and run multiple scenarios to look at the estimated impact of different intervention packages and coverage levels for their countries, states or districts.

These scenarios, developed with the LiST tool, provide a structured format for program managers or ministry of health personnel to combine the best scientific information about effectiveness of interventions for maternal, neonatal and child health with information about cause of death and current coverage of interventions to inform their planning and decision-making, to help prioritize investments and evaluate existing programs.

A consortium of academic and international organizations, led by Institute of International Programs at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School, and supported by a Gates Foundation grant to the US Fund for UNICEF, has developed a user-friendly tool to estimate the impact of scaling-up maternal, newborn and child health interventions

Commentary:
LiST: using epidemiology to guide child survival policymaking and programming
Cesar G Victora Department of Programa de Pós-Graduação em Epidemiologia, Universidade Federal de Pelotas, Pelotas, Brazil
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/extract/39/suppl_1/i1

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