Lancet
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Randomized Controlled Trial Pragmatic Clinical Trial
Effectiveness of a nurse-led intensive home-visitation programme for first-time teenage mothers (Building Blocks): a pragmatic randomised controlled trial.
Many countries now offer support to teenage mothers to help them to achieve long-term socioeconomic stability and to give a successful start to their children. The Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) is a licensed intensive home-visiting intervention developed in the USA and introduced into practice in England that involves up to 64 structured home visits from early pregnancy until the child's second birthday by specially recruited and trained family nurses. We aimed to assess the effectiveness of giving the programme to teenage first-time mothers on infant and maternal outcomes up to 24 months after birth. ⋯ Department of Health Policy Research Programme.
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Access to quality-assured antimicrobials is regarded as part of the human right to health, yet universal access is often undermined in low-income and middle-income countries. Lack of access to the instruments necessary to make the correct diagnosis and prescribe antimicrobials appropriately, in addition to weak health systems, heightens the challenge faced by prescribers. Evidence-based interventions in community and health-care settings can increase access to appropriately prescribed antimicrobials. The key global enablers of sustainable financing, governance, and leadership will be necessary to achieve access while preventing excess antimicrobial use.
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Recent years have seen substantial improvements in life expectancy and access to antimicrobials, especially in low-income and lower-middle-income countries, but increasing pathogen resistance to antimicrobials threatens to roll back this progress. Resistant organisms in health-care and community settings pose a threat to survival rates from serious infections, including neonatal sepsis and health-care-associated infections, and limit the potential health benefits from surgeries, transplants, and cancer treatment. ⋯ Here, we describe the importance of effective antimicrobials. We assess the disease burden caused by limited access to antimicrobials, attributable to resistance to antimicrobials, and the potential effect of vaccines in restricting the need for antibiotics.
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To combat the threat to human health and biosecurity from antimicrobial resistance, an understanding of its mechanisms and drivers is needed. Emergence of antimicrobial resistance in microorganisms is a natural phenomenon, yet antimicrobial resistance selection has been driven by antimicrobial exposure in health care, agriculture, and the environment. ⋯ Minimising resistance should therefore be considered comprehensively, by resistance mechanism, microorganism, antimicrobial drug, host, and context; parallel to new drug discovery, broad ranging, multidisciplinary research is needed across these five levels, interlinked across the health-care, agriculture, and environment sectors. Intelligent, integrated approaches, mindful of potential unintended results, are needed to ensure sustained, worldwide access to effective antimicrobials.