Health Equity: 04/27/11

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

[EQ] Campbell International Development Group opens to register systematic reviews

Campbell International Development Group opens to register systematic reviews

Campbell has established a new group: the International Development Coordinating Group (IDCG)

This network of researchers, policy makers, and practitioners will produce and disseminate systematic reviews of high policy relevance on the effects of international development interventions.

The Group’s scope covers social and economic development interventions which aim to improve the quality of life for people in low- and middle-income countries. These include interventions in the areas of agriculture and rural development; banking and finance; transport, energy, water and sanitation infrastructure; social development; and governance.

The International Development Coordinating Group has grown out of Campbell's partnership with the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) seeks to "improve the lives of poor people in low- and middle-income countries by providing, and summarizing, evidence of what works, when, why and for how much".

Professor Howard White, Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Australia and Executive Director of 3ie, and Professor Peter Tugwell, University of Ottawa, Canada are Co-Chairs of the Group.

The International Development Coordinating Group is committed to providing authors with the support necessary to complete Campbell reviews and will provide or arrange substantial technical assistance for reviewers, especially with respect to information retrieval, critical appraisal and statistical methods. We welcome the participation of researchers, students, practitioners, policy makers and service users. Any interested party can propose a title for a review, form a review team, and submit a protocol for a Campbell review to the Group.

Steps for registering a systematic review with the International Development Coordinating Group

Website http://bit.ly/jgXkFa

New titles are approved by our Advisory Board, an internationally representative group of experts in international development research, policy and practice. Protocols and reviews are also subjected to a rigorous peer assessment process. We solicit critiques from substantive, methodological, and information search specialists and seek the Editorial Board's approval before publishing protocol and review documents in the Campbell Library. The process of registering a review with our Group is as follows:

1. Authors contact Group secretariat to discuss proposed title and scope

2. Authors are asked to submit a title registration form for review

3. Once title agreed, authors are required to submit a protocol within 6 months of title registration.
Protocols are then subject to rigorous peer review by International Development Group editors and the Campbell Collaboration Methods Group

4. Systematic review reports submitted to the Group are also subject to rigorous peer review.

For all enquiries regarding registration, please contact Birte Snilstveit: bsnilstveit@3ieimpact.org

Financial support for reviews-in-progress

Financial support for reviews is expected to be available from on-going requests for proposals by organisations such as the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation(3ie), the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) and the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), among others.

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[EQ] Campbell International Development Group opens to register systematic reviews

Campbell International Development Group opens to register systematic reviews

Campbell has established a new group: the International Development Coordinating Group (IDCG)

URL: http://bit.ly/jFe9JM

This network of researchers, policy makers, and practitioners will produce and disseminate systematic reviews of high policy relevance on the effects of international development interventions.

Professor Howard White, Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Australia and Executive Director of 3ie, and Professor Peter Tugwell, University of Ottawa, Canada are Co-Chairs of the Group.

Steps for registering a systematic review with the International Development Coordinating Group

Website http://bit.ly/jgXkFa

1. Authors contact Group secretariat to discuss proposed title and scope

2. Authors are asked to submit a title registration form for review

4. Systematic review reports submitted to the Group are also subject to rigorous peer review.

For all enquiries regarding registration, please contact Birte Snilstveit: bsnilstveit@3ieimpact.org

Twitter http://twitter.com/eqpaho

[EQ] Development assistance for health: trends and prospects

Development assistance for health: trends and prospects

Christopher JL Murray a, Brent Anderson a, Roy Burstein a, Katherine Leach-Kemon a, Matthew Schneider a, Annette Tardif a, Raymond Zhang a
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, Seattle, USA

The Lancet, Early Online Publication, 11 April 2011doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(10)62356-2

Website: http://bit.ly/k2JgEt

“…….The global economic crisis that began to unfold in 2008 has raised serious concerns about the ability of developing countries to meet targets for improvements in population health outcomes, and about the ability of developed countries to meet their commitments to fund health programmes in developing countries.

This uncertainty underscores the importance of tracking spending on global health, to ensure resources are directed efficiently to the world's most pressing health issues….”

“…….Growth in global health spending will probably slow and might contract in 2011. We will enter a period of dramatically intensified competition for resources among the many important global health priorities.
Although the global health community is unlikely to influence the politics of fiscal contraction, it can take on two specific challenges: provide compelling evidence that past and continuing investments are making an impact; and show that resources devoted to health programmes are an effective means to advance health and broader development goals.
It will be crucial in this environment for the global health community to transparently evaluate and communicate about the successes and failures of global health funding. Only real evidence of success will sustain global health financing in coming years….”

Supplementary webappendix
Webtable: Development assistance for health by channel of assistance, 2000–10
http://bit.ly/melZAr

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[EQ] Building a Research Framework for Social Epidemiology

Contextual Influences on the Individual Life Course:
Building a Research Framework for Social Epidemiology

Juan Merlo, Lund University, Sweden
Psychosocial Intervention, April 2011, Vol. 20 (1), 109-118

Available online PDF [10p.] at: http://bit.ly/i5s64N

“……Individual health is not only individual responsibility, but also depends on the social contexts that condition the individual across the life course. However, while it is of high public health relevance to identify these contextual influences, they still remain poorly understood, and the research performed so far has suffered from severe limitations.

This paper presents a research agenda for social epidemiology that underlines a number of novel concepts, ideas, and unanswered questions deserving future investigation. The paper presents a conceptual framework intended to organize the investigation of geographical, socioeconomic, and cultural disparities in health.

This framework identifies five main areas of research:
(1) identifying the relevant contexts that influence individual health by measuring general contextual effects,
(2) measuring contextual characteristics, the specific effects of these characteristics on individual health and their underlying cross-level mechanisms,
(3) investigating general and specific contextual effects from a longitudinal,a life-course perspective and across generations,
(4) developing quasi-experimental methods (e.g., family-based designs) for the analysis of causal effects in contextual analyses, and
(5) using the achieved scientific knowledge for planning and evaluating interventions.

The proposed framework emphasizes that future research in social epidemiology should question the current means-centric reductionism that is mostly concerned with the identification of (contextual) risk factors, and it stresses the need to deliberately investigate determinants of variance. In fact, social epidemiology is not only interested in increasing the (mean) health of the population, but also in understanding and decreasing inappropriate health inequalities (variance). ….”

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[EQ] Priority actions for the non-communicable disease crisis

Priority actions for the non-communicable disease crisis

The Lancet, Volume 377, Issue 9775, Pages 1438 - 1447, 23 April 2011

Prof Robert Beaglehole DSc a , Prof Ruth Bonita PhD a, Richard Horton FMedSci b, Cary Adams MBA c, George Alleyne MD d, Perviz Asaria MPH e, Vanessa Baugh MSc f, Henk Bekedam MD g, Nils Billo MD h, Prof Sally Casswell PhD i, Michele Cecchini MD j, Ruth Colagiuri BEd s, Prof Stephen Colagiuri MBBS s, Tea Collins DrPH k, Prof Shah Ebrahim DM l, Michael Engelgau MD m, Gauden Galea MD n, Thomas Gaziano MD o, Robert Geneau PhD p, Prof Andy Haines FMedSci q, James Hospedales FFPH d, Prof Prabhat Jha DPhil r, Ann Keeling MA s, Prof Stephen Leeder MD t, Paul Lincoln BSc u, Prof Martin McKee MD q, Judith Mackay FRCP v, Prof Roger Magnusson PhD t, Prof Rob Moodie MBBS w, Modi Mwatsama BSc u, Sania Nishtar MD x, Prof Bo Norrving MD y, David Patterson LLM z, Prof Peter Piot MD q, Johanna Ralston MS aa, Manju Rani PhD g, Prof K Srinath Reddy DM bb, Franco Sassi PhD j, Nick Sheron FRCP cc, David Stuckler PhD dd, Prof Il Suh PhD ee, Julie Torode PhD c, Cherian Varghese MD g, Judith Watt BA ff, for The Lancet NCD Action Group and the NCD Alliance

Website: http://bit.ly/iegnxo

The UN High-Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) in September, 2011, is an unprecedented opportunity to create a sustained global movement against premature death and preventable morbidity and disability from NCDs, mainly heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and chronic respiratory disease. The increasing global crisis in NCDs is a barrier to development goals including poverty reduction, health equity, economic stability, and human security.

The Lancet NCD Action Group and the NCD Alliance propose five overarching priority actions for the response to the crisis—leadership, prevention, treatment, international cooperation, and monitoring and accountability—and the delivery of five priority interventions—tobacco control, salt reduction, improved diets and physical activity, reduction in hazardous alcohol intake, and essential drugs and technologies.

The priority interventions were chosen for their health effects, cost-effectiveness, low costs of implementation, and political and financial feasibility. The most urgent and immediate priority is tobacco control.

We propose as a goal for 2040, a world essentially free from tobacco where less than 5% of people use tobacco. Implementation of the priority interventions, at an estimated global commitment of about US$9 billion per year, will bring enormous benefits to social and economic development and to the health sector. If widely adopted, these interventions will achieve the global goal of reducing NCD death rates by 2% per year, averting tens of millions of premature deaths in this decade.….”

Related links:

The huge impact of chronic conditions
Why do some disease-management programs succeed while others founder?
McKinsey research http://bit.ly/hTx8WT

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