ABSTRACT
The Global Strategy for Women's Children's and Adolescents' Health emphasizes accountability as essential to ensure that decision-makers have the information required to meet the health needs of their populations and stresses the importance of tracking resources, results, and rights to see 'what works, what needs improvement and what requires increased attention'. However, results from accountability initiatives are mixed and there is a lack of broadly applicable, validated tools for planning, monitoring and evaluating accountability interventions. This article documents an effort to transform accountability markers-including political will, leadership and the monitor-review-act cycle-into a measurement tool that can be used prospectively or retrospectively to plan, monitor and evaluate accountability initiatives. It describes the development process behind the tool including the literature review, framework development and subsequent building of the measurement tool itself. It also examines feedback on the tool from a panel of global experts and the results of a pilot test conducted in Bauchi and Gombe states in Nigeria. The results demonstrate that the tool is an effective aid for accountability initiatives to reflect on their own progress and provides a useful structure for future planning, monitoring and evaluation. The tool can be applied and adapted to other accountability mechanisms working in global health.
Subject(s)
Global Health , Preventive Health Services , Social Responsibility , Adolescent , Adolescent Health , Child , Female , Global Health/economics , Humans , Nigeria , Preventive Health Services/economics , Preventive Health Services/ethics , Retrospective StudiesSubject(s)
Animal Technicians , Veterinarians , Veterinary Medicine/organization & administration , Female , Humans , PregnancyABSTRACT
OBJECTIVES: The importance of traumatic events is recognised by the public but the profile of psychological sequelae such as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) within psychiatry and medicine is unclear. We aimed to establish the profile of PTSD within high impact medical journals and within psychiatric journals based in America and the United Kingdom, since the initial classification of PTSD in DSM-III in 1980 and, before and after classification of PTSD in ICD-10 in 1992. METHOD: A survey of all articles on post-traumatic reactions published in eight journals between 1980 and 2000. RESULTS: The proportion of articles on PTSD was less in UK based psychiatric journals than their counterparts based in America. The proportion of articles published after the classification of PTSD in ICD-10 has increased in both psychiatric and medical journals. CONCLUSIONS: In UK based journals, there is an under-representation of articles on PTSD compared with disorders of similar prevalence.
