Child and Adolescent Health and Development

Introduction to this section |  Child health and health systems | Policy | Planning and management
Financing | Quality care | Human resources | Organization of work at health facility | Drugs, vaccine and supply management | Referral | Health information system | Supervision | Client satisfaction |
Evaluation | Research

A policy-supportive environment is essential to both the implementation and sustainability of public health interventions. Mechanisms should also be formally agreed and in place to monitor the implementation of such policies, evaluate them against the original objectives for which they were developed, and update them as needed. Child health initiatives are no exception. For example, the incorporation of the IMCI principles and elements in key strategic documents and the updating of existing policies or the development of new policies to support IMCI implementation in the long-term is critical to achieve and sustain the child health outcomes for which specific interventions were designed. Click here to see an example of how essential policy decisions are in supporting effective child health care interventions. A few countries in the Region have included IMCI as a key strategy in their national health development plans or similar documents which set mid-term or long-term directions. During the process of country adaptation of the IMCI strategy when policies and guidelines are usually reviewed to ensure consistency, it was observed that many countries lacked written policies or had child health-related policies or guidelines scattered in different policy or training documents, often by programme. This observation and the need felt in countries to have a national child health policy document, led the Regional Office to launch the Child Health Policy Initiative. The initiative aims to assist countries in developing national child health policy documents. As part of this initiative, the Regional Office developed the document “Development of National Child Health Policy – Phase I: The situation analysis” in September 2004, to guide countries in this phase, taking into consideration the experience gained in the Region which was reviewed in an intercountry workshop in Damascus.

 Given the importance of the topic, a full section of this website is dedicated to the Child Health Policy Initiative, to which the reader is referred for more information and details.   Top