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Author

Agnes Soucat

Other affiliations: African Development Bank, World Bank
Bio: Agnes Soucat is an academic researcher from World Health Organization. The author has contributed to research in topics: Health policy & Health care. The author has an hindex of 31, co-authored 76 publications receiving 5556 citations. Previous affiliations of Agnes Soucat include African Development Bank & World Bank.


Papers
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify three categories of challenges that have to be addressed to maintain and enhance human health in the face of increasingly harmful environmental trends: conceptual and empathy failures (imagination challenges), such as an overreliance on gross domestic product as a measure of human progress, the failure to account for future health and environmental harms over present day gains, and the disproportionate eff ect of those harms on the poor and those in developing nations.

1,452 citations

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TL;DR: P4P financial performance incentives can improve both the use and quality of maternal and child health services, and could be a useful intervention to accelerate progress towards Millennium Development Goals for maternal andChild health.

551 citations

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TL;DR: Task shifting is a promising policy option to increase the productive efficiency of the delivery of health care services, increasing the number of services provided at a given quality and cost.
Abstract: Health workforce needs-based shortages and skill mix imbalances are significant health workforce challenges. Task shifting, defined as delegating tasks to existing or new cadres with either less training or narrowly tailored training, is a potential strategy to address these challenges. This study uses an economics perspective to review the skill mix literature to determine its strength of the evidence, identify gaps in the evidence, and to propose a research agenda. Studies primarily from low-income countries published between 2006 and September 2010 were found using Google Scholar and PubMed. Keywords included terms such as skill mix, task shifting, assistant medical officer, assistant clinical officer, assistant nurse, assistant pharmacist, and community health worker. Thirty-one studies were selected to analyze, based on the strength of evidence. First, the studies provide substantial evidence that task shifting is an important policy option to help alleviate workforce shortages and skill mix imbalances. For example, in Mozambique, surgically trained assistant medical officers, who were the key providers in district hospitals, produced similar patient outcomes at a significantly lower cost as compared to physician obstetricians and gynaecologists. Second, although task shifting is promising, it can present its own challenges. For example, a study analyzing task shifting in HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa noted quality and safety concerns, professional and institutional resistance, and the need to sustain motivation and performance. Third, most task shifting studies compare the results of the new cadre with the traditional cadre. Studies also need to compare the new cadre's results to the results from the care that would have been provided--if any care at all--had task shifting not occurred. Task shifting is a promising policy option to increase the productive efficiency of the delivery of health care services, increasing the number of services provided at a given quality and cost. Future studies should examine the development of new professional cadres that evolve with technology and country-specific labour markets. To strengthen the evidence, skill mix changes need to be evaluated with a rigorous research design to estimate the effect on patient health outcomes, quality of care, and costs.

484 citations

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TL;DR: Development, implementation, and monitoring of national action plans for neonatal survival is a priority and the running costs of the selected packages at 90% coverage in the 75 countries with the highest mortality rates are estimated to be US4.1 billion dollars a year.

323 citations


Cited by
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Journal ArticleDOI
Mohsen Naghavi1, Haidong Wang1, Rafael Lozano1, Adrian Davis2  +728 moreInstitutions (294)
TL;DR: In the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013 (GBD 2013) as discussed by the authors, the authors used the GBD 2010 methods with some refinements to improve accuracy applied to an updated database of vital registration, survey, and census data.

5,792 citations

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Haidong Wang1, Mohsen Naghavi1, Christine Allen1, Ryan M Barber1  +841 moreInstitutions (293)
TL;DR: The Global Burden of Disease 2015 Study provides a comprehensive assessment of all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 249 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1980 to 2015, finding several countries in sub-Saharan Africa had very large gains in life expectancy, rebounding from an era of exceedingly high loss of life due to HIV/AIDS.

4,804 citations

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TL;DR: Food in the Anthropocene : the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems focuses on meat, fish, vegetables and fruit as sources of protein.

4,710 citations

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TL;DR: The Global Burden of Disease 2016 Study (GBD 2016) provides a comprehensive assessment of cause-specific mortality for 264 causes in 195 locations from 1980 to 2016 as discussed by the authors, which includes evaluation of the expected epidemiological transition with changes in development and where local patterns deviate from these trends.

3,228 citations