MED078000 Archives

Evaluating Public Health Interventions

Public health interventions include any effort or policy that attempts to improve the health among individuals or an entire population. They can be run by governmental health departments or non-governmental organisations and can include educational programmes, screening programmes, vaccination programmes, environmental improvements and health promotion campaigns. Interventions that include multiple independent or interacting components are referred to as complex. Evaluating and predicting the efficacy of any public health intervention, as well as calculating the cost effectiveness is essential.

Using examples from multiple published studies conducted around the world, this textbook shows readers how to evaluate public health interventions in real world settings. It will enable readers to understand how to investigate whether a public health intervention works, for whom, when, where, how, and why. It provides a comprehensive introduction to key areas of evaluation including understanding complex interventions, developing programme theories, community engagement in evaluation, and the main methods used in process, impact and economic evaluation. It explains how different methods can be used individually and in combination to answer different kinds of evaluation question and at different phases in an evaluation cycle and considers how the results of evaluations can be brought together to inform action.

This textbook is the ideal guide for students, practitioners and policymakers in the field of health policy and evaluation.

Viral Loads

Drawing upon the empirical scholarship and research expertise of contributors from all settled continents and from diverse life settings and economies, Viral Loads illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic, and responses to it, lay bare and load onto people’s lived realities in countries around the world.

A crosscutting theme pertains to how social unevenness and gross economic disparities are shaping global and local responses to the pandemic, and illustrate the effects of both the virus and efforts to contain it in ways that amplify these inequalities. At the same time, the contributions highlight the nature of contemporary social life, including virtual communication, the nature of communities, neoliberalism and contemporary political economies, and the shifting nature of nation states and the role of government. Over half of the world’s population has been affected by restrictions of movement, with physical distancing requirements and self-isolation recommendations impacting profoundly on everyday life but also on the economy, resulting also, in turn, with dramatic shifts in the economy and in mass unemployment.

By reflecting on how the pandemic has interrupted daily lives, state infrastructures and healthcare systems, the contributing authors in this volume mobilise anthropological theories and concepts to locate the pandemic in a highly connected and exceedingly unequal world. The book is ambitious in its scope – spanning the entire globe – and daring in its insistence that medical anthropology must be a part of the growing calls to build a new world.

Covid’s Chronicities

COVID-19 continues to cause severe morbidity and ongoing mortality. Covid’s Chronicities documents the shifts that have occurred in the face of the pandemic, the state and community responses to it, its continuing toll on health services, economies and communities, and its compounding effects on people’s health, lives and livelihoods.

This volume draws on research from across Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and Africa, providing surprising contrasts and consistencies of experience. As the pandemic has shifted from urgency to chronic unpredictability, everywhere people have struggled to make sense of state actions in infection control, testing strategies and the roll out of vaccines, and to remake social life. The contributing authors illustrate with poignancy how chronic social problems and pandemic effects have worked bidirectionally, compounding multiple inequalities and exacerbating, for some, despair and disassociation. They also demonstrate the ingenuity of communities – of Indigenous ways of knowing and providing care in some settings, and elsewhere, the power of robust local community networks and informal innovations. While this book exposes the pandemic’s exploitation of deep structures of state and societal neglect, and describes the resultant morass, it also illustrates the determination and imaginations of caring communities to withstand Covid’s harms.