Evidence Aid newsletter: 4 October 2022
Welcome to the latest newsletter from Evidence Aid, containing brief details of some of our latest summaries, information on our recent work and a brief insight into our social media channels. Please forward this newsletter to anyone who might be interested. If they would like to receive our newsletters directly, they should email info@evidenceaid.org.
Excerpts from recent additions to our evidence collections – click the link to get to the full summary and the translations as they become available.
Community health workers in humanitarian settings
Community-health workers can provide access to essential health and nutrition services during humanitarian crises. This scoping review explored their role in delivering such services in low- or middle-income countries, particularly in conflict-related or disease outbreak settings. It found that community health workers can provide services and critical emergency response activities during crises including population displacement, and that communities without local community-health workers have less access to services.
(Included in our COVID-19, Resilient Health Systems and Earthquakes collections, and available in العربية, 汉语, 漢語, 华语, 華語, 中文, Français, Deutsch, Italiano, Português and Español.)
Community participation in the design and implementation of humanitarian assistance might improve the contextualization of healthcare responses in humanitarian conflict-affected communities, particularly among displaced communities in low- and middle-income countries.
This review of 18 studies provides some, albeit limited evidence on humanitarian health responses and community participation, which suggests that participation at the community level is beneficial for health outcomes and for access to and use of healthcare services.
(Included in our Resilient Health Systems and Health of Refugees collections, and available in Français, and Español at the time of writing.)
Multiple session early psychological interventions preventing post‐traumatic stress disorder
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychological condition that can occur after someone experiences a traumatic event. Psychological therapies, including early multiple-session psychological interventions, are used to try to prevent it and the authors of this Cochrane review found that early multiple-session psychological interventions designed to prevent PTSD in adults may be more effective than usual care in reducing the number of people diagnosed with PTSD at 3 to 6 months follow-up.
(Included in our Resilient Health Systems, Earthquakes and Managing Mental Injuries in Disasters collections.)
Ongoing work
- As you can see from the above examples, we are continuing to add summaries to our existing collections and to add new collections, including Managing Mental Injuries in Disasters.
- During the last month, we added 20 new summaries to our Resilient Health Systems
- We are also working with the World Health Organization to further develop the WHO Knowledge Hub for the WHO Guidance on Research Methods for Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management and are liaising with the chapter authors to prepare additional content, including podcasts, slideshows and videos.
- We are completing work for the Florida International University on a collection of evidence summaries and a report on urban disaster risk reduction strategies for informal settlements.
- On 20 September, we took part in a seminar and discussion on ‘Understanding and leveraging the power of informal aid networks in times of conflict and crisis’ which was convened by Woodrow Rosenbaum and the GivingTuesday Data Commons Impact Measurement Group with presentations by speakers from Ukraine, Puerto Rico, Liberia and Lebanon. We look forward to being involved further.
Social media
Please look at our social media channels, follow us and share our posts. We promote our summaries and the work of Evidence Aid generally through Twitter (@Evidence Aid), Facebook (Evidence Aid – page and group) and Instagram (evidenceaid). Some recent examples of Twitter posts are:
https://twitter.com/EvidenceAid/status/1574382388100186115
https://twitter.com/EvidenceAid/status/1572900513875640323
https://twitter.com/EvidenceAid/status/1570773246630191104
If you have suggestions for how we can improve what we do on social media or would like to help us to compile reports and statistics on our media presence, please contact us.
How can we help you?
We would welcome your comments on how we can improve the Evidence Aid resources, including our evidence collections, so that we provide you with the information you need. We’d love to hear from you about your needs and how we might help to meet them.
The Evidence Aid team
Information about Evidence Aid staff, Interns, Advisors and Trustees is available on our website.
Volunteers
Our volunteers provide us with a huge amount of support and contribute to searching, screening, and downloading reviews, preparing, and writing summaries, supporting our website and advising on translations as well as helping out with project management. They are vital to our work, and anyone interested in joining should email info@evidenceaid.org.