Health, wellbeing and care Archives - Page 2 of 7 - Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform

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Overcoming barriers: Integrating South Sudanese refugee health professionals into Uganda’s workforce

21st June 2024

Around the world many health professionals displaced as refugees face multiple barriers to securing meaningful work in host countries' health systems. Dr Jennifer Palmer, Associate Professor of Anthropology in Global Health, LSHTM, and SSHAP team member, talks about her research among South Sudanese health workers who are refugees in Uganda.

Central and East Africa Hub

news

SSHAP hosts roundtable discussion on the mpox outbreak in the DRC

11th June 2024

Contextual social, political and livelihood understandings, factors affecting care-seeking and challenges to vaccination rollout were among the on-the-ground realities relating to mpox spread that experts discussed.

Central and East Africa Hub

Report

Roundtable Report: Discussion on mpox in DRC and social science considerations for operational response

This report synthesises the discussions at a SSHAP-organised roundtable on the mpox outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo held in May 2024 to appraise the situation, with a focus on social science insights for informing context-sensitive risk communication…

Central and East Africa Hub

SSHAP

2024

Infographic

Child engagement in the context of disease outbreaks in Eastern and Southern Africa

This infographic, in Arabic, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Swahili as well as English, summarises insights from a recent key considerations brief exploring why, when and how to engage children in the prevention, response and recovery stages of disease outbreak in…

Central and East Africa Hub

SSHAP

2024

Briefing

Child engagement in the context of disease outbreaks in Eastern and Southern Africa

This brief explores why, when and how to engage children in the prevention, response and recovery stages of disease outbreaks.

Central and East Africa Hub

SSHAP

2024

Briefing

Social, structural and community dynamics of cholera transmission and mortality in Ethiopia

This key considerations brief was developed to support response efforts by exploring the social and structural determinants and community dynamics of cholera infection and mortality in Ethiopia.

Central and East Africa Hub

SSHAP

2024

Policy document

Technical Guidelines for Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response in Nigeria

The goal of IDSR is to improve the ability of LGAs to detect and respond to diseases and conditions that cause high levels of death, illness and disability in the LGA‘s catchment area. Strengthening skills and resources for integrated disease…

West Africa Hub

National Action Plan for Health Security, Nigeria

The National Action Plan for Health Security (NAPHS) is a comprehensive multi-sectoral plan that integrates multiple workplans including REDISSE, NCDC Strategy Plan, AMR Action Plan, and immunizations plans, addressing the major gaps identified by the Joint External Evaluation (2017) and…

West Africa Hub

Briefing

Key Considerations: Disability-Inclusive Humanitarian Action and Emergency Response in South and Southeast Asia and Beyond

In many settings, people with disabilities face multiple and complex layers of environmental, societal and structural barriers. These barriers can lead to them being disproportionately harmed, neglected and excluded during humanitarian and other emergency responses.1–3 This is especially evident in…

SSHAP

2023

Imagining HIV/AIDS: morality and perceptions of personal risk in Nigeria

The disparity between people’s knowledge about HIV/AIDS and the extent to which they take measures to protect themselves is one of the most vexing issues for public health workers and social science analysts. This paper aims to explain some of…

West Africa Hub

2003

Discriminate biopower and everyday biopolitics: views on sickle cell testing in Dakar

Many physicians in Senegal and France, where most Senegalese sickle cell specialists are partially trained, assume that genetic testing that could imply selective abortion for people with sickle cell would run counter to the religious and cultural ethics of people…

West Africa Hub

2004

“Right tool,” wrong “job”: Manual vacuum aspiration, post-abortion care and transnational population politics in Senega

The “rightness” of a technology for completing a particular task is negotiated by medical professionals, patients, state institutions, manufacturing companies, and non-governmental organizations. This paper shows how certain technologies may challenge the meaning of the “job” they are designed to…

West Africa Hub

2015

Community health care workers in pursuit of TB: Discourses and dilemmas

Community-led tuberculosis (TB) active case finding is widely promoted, heavily funded, but many efforts fail to meet expectations. The underlying reasons why TB symptom screening programs underperform are poorly understood. This study examines Nigerian stakeholders’ insights to characterize the mechanisms,…

West Africa Hub

2020

Research paper

Youth, sin and sex in Nigeria: Christianity and HIV/AIDS-related beliefs and behaviour among rural-urban migrants

In Nigeria, popular understandings of HIV/AIDS and individual risk assessment and behaviour unfold within an interpretative grid that draws on a religious moral framework. This paper reports results from a two‐year study of HIV/AIDS‐related beliefs and behaviour among adolescent and…

West Africa Hub

2004

Background report

Your Pocket Is What Cures You: The Politics of Health in Senegal

In the wake of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and health reforms in the 1990s, the majority of sub-Saharan African governments spend less than ten dollars per capita on health annually, and many Africans have limited access to basic…

West Africa Hub

2019

Research paper

“You have to find a caring man, like your father!” Gendering sickle cell and refashioning women’s moral boundaries in Sierra Leone

This qualitative study undertaken in 2018, explores if and how sickle cell disorders become gendered in Sierra Leone through the analytical framework of a feminist ethics of care.

West Africa Hub

2020

Research paper

‘With the kanyaleng and the help of god, you don’t feel ashamed’: women experiencing infertility in Casamance, Senegal

While the precarious situation of women with infertility in Sub-Saharan Africa is well documented, little is known about the ways in which such women show agency despite the challenges that infertility brings to their lives. This study provided a holistic…

West Africa Hub

2022

Research paper

Why didn’t you write this in your diary? Or how nurses (mis)used clinic diaries to (re)claim shared reflexive spaces in Senegal

At the intersection between writings and silences, this paper explores the role played by the clinic diaries to mediate ethnographic encounters, and the iterative nature of ‘doing fieldwork’ to produce knowledge in hierarchical health systems. This paper also reflects on…

West Africa Hub

2019

Research paper

What post-abortion care indicators don’t measure: Global abortion politics and obstetric practice in Senegal

This article draws on an ethnography of Senegal’s post-abortion care (PAC) program, conducted between 2010 and 2011, to illustrate how PAC indicators obscure the professional and technological complexities of treating abortion complications in contexts where abortion is illegal. The author…

West Africa Hub

2020

Research paper

Treatment success or failure in children and adolescents born with HIV in rural Senegal: An anthropological perspective

The article presents the results of an anthropological study that aims to examine the modalities of medical and social care for CALHIV, identify the various structural and social determinants of treatment failure or success, and ascertain their respective influence. The…

West Africa Hub

2023

Research paper

Traditional healers in Nigeria: perception of cause, treatment and referral practices for severe malaria.

Malaria remains one of the main causes of mortality among young children in sub-Saharan Africa. In Nigeria traditional healers play an important role in health care delivery and the majority of the population depend on them for most of their…

West Africa Hub

2006

Research paper

The Islamification of antiretroviral therapy: Reconciling HIV treatment and religion in northern Nigeria.

Access and adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) are essential to HIV treatment success and epidemic control. This article is about how HIV-positive Muslims and providers balance ART with religious tenets and obligations.

West Africa Hub

2017

Research paper

The anti-politics of health reform: household power relations and child health in rural Senegal

This article employs ethnographic evidence from rural Senegal to explore two dimensions of health sector reform. First, it makes the case that health reforms intersect with and exacerbate existing social, political, and economic inequalities. Second, the article explores how liberal…

West Africa Hub

2009

Research paper

Taking chances, making choices: the tactical dimensions of “reproductive strategies” in southwestern Nigeria

Reproductive outcomes may be less a result of consciously pursued “reproductive strategies” than of other choices, and are subject to the influence not only of other individuals, but also of caprice and circumstance. Drawing on ethnographic research in southwestern Nigeria,…

West Africa Hub

2007

Research paper

Subversive Epidemiology in Abortion Care: Reproductive Governance from the Global to the Local in Argentina and Senegal

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Argentina and Senegal, this paper explores how health workers have adapted the global postabortion care model in ways that simultaneously challenge and reinforce national prohibitions on abortion. Although the global postabortion care model aimed to…

West Africa Hub

2023

Research paper

Social learning, influence, and ethnomedicine: Individual, neighborhood and social network influences on attachment to an ethnomedical cultural model in rural Senegal

In this paper, the authors examine the association between individual, neighborhood, and social network characteristics and the likelihood of attachment to an ethnomedical cultural model encompassing beliefs about etiology of disease, appropriate therapeutic and preventative measures, and more general beliefs…

West Africa Hub

2019

Research paper

Right tool, wrong “job”: Manual vacuum aspiration, post-abortion care and transnational population politics in Senegal

West Africa Hub

2015

Research paper

Rewriting abortion: deploying medical records in jurisdictional negotiation over a forbidden practice in Senegal

This study explores how medical providers deploy medical records in boundary work over the treatment of complications of spontaneous and induced abortion in Senegal, where induced abortion is prohibited under any circumstance.

West Africa Hub

2014

Research paper

Responsibility, repair and care in Sierra Leone’s health system.

Central to the workings of a hospital are the technical and bureaucratic systems that ensure the effective coordination of information and biological materials of patients across time and space. In this paper, which is based on ethnographic research in a…

West Africa Hub

2022

Research paper

Progress in the face of cuts: a qualitative Nigerian case study of maintaining progress towards universal health coverage after losing donor assistance

In the coming years, about a dozen middle-income countries are excepted to transition out of development assistance for health (DAH) based on their economic growth. This anticipated loss of external funds at a time when there is a need for…

West Africa Hub

2021

Preserving the pot and water: a traditional concept of reproductive health in a Yoruba community, Nigeria

Within the background of the outcome of the 1994 Cairo Conference, this paper describes a traditional conceptualization of prenatal care in a Nigerian community and draws their implication for effective delivery of reproductive health services in the area.

West Africa Hub

1996

Perspectives on polio and immunization in Northern Nigeria

Through the efforts of the global campaign to eradicate poliomyelitis, polio cases have declined worldwide, from 35,251 cases in 1988, to 1449 cases as of 28 October 2005. However, confirmed cases of wild polio virus continue to be reported from…

West Africa Hub

2006

Patronage, per diems and the “workshop mentality”: the practice of family planning programs in southeastern Nigeria

This article examines the ways in which family planning program personnel in Nigeria appropriate population program resources and models of social change to suit local priorities.

West Africa Hub

2003

Patronage, partnership, voluntarism: Community-based health insurance and the improvisation of universal health coverage in Senegal

The turn towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in the past decade raises the question of the role of the state, following years of state withdrawal and a fragmented approach to public health. Senegal introduced its version of UHC, Couverture Maladie…

West Africa Hub

2023

Past horrors, present struggles: the role of stigma in the association between war experiences and psychosocial adjustment among former child soldiers in Sierra Leone.

We examined the role of stigma (manifest in discrimination as well as lower levels of community and family acceptance) in the relationship between war-related experiences and psychosocial adjustment (depression, anxiety, hostility and adaptive behaviors).

West Africa Hub

2010