Resources

In many low- and middle-income countries, hundreds of thousands of people—including many newborns, children, and pregnant women—die needlessly each year from hypoxemia, or a low concentration of oxygen in the blood. Hypoxemia can be caused by a range of illnesses and complications, including pneumonia, neonatal infections, premature birth, obstetric emergencies, and respiratory infections like COVID-19.The COVID-19 pandemic has pointedly highlighted the lack of access to oxygen in lower-resource settings. The biggest barriers to oxygen therapy access include inadequate supply and human resource capacity, funding constraints, and the inability to deploy resources in countries rapidly in a way that ensures maximum impact while not overwhelming existing health care systems. The oxygen landscape is at a pivotal point where short-term pandemic-response efforts require continued support while transitioning to long-term, sustained strategies for ensuring access.This fact sheet offers an overview of the SOURCE project to support countries to equitably improve access to high-quality oxygen services at all levels of the health care system in order to reduce maternal, child, and overall mortality from hypoxemia-related causes. To do so, PATH will incorporate near-term pandemic-response work into a robust set of implementation, advocacy, and research activities that will ensure long-term access to medical oxygen and resilient systems for future pandemic-response efforts.

Medical oxygen proved to be a lifesaving drug during the COVID-19 pandemic in the absence of a proven therapeutic solution for patients suffering from the infection. In May 2021, India's health infrastructure was overwhelmed by the caseload, with a lack of oxygen, manpower, drugs, and hospital beds. The most difficult challenge for the country was providing an adequate volume of medical oxygen for the most severely ill patients who were unable to breathe on their own.PATH, with its extensive experience in respiratory care management, responded quickly and played a critical role in strengthening the oxygen ecosystem at this critical juncture. It provided technical assistance in the installation and procurement of PSA oxygen generation plants and oxygen concentrators, as well as improved their readiness.Furthermore, in order to build capacity for long-term sustainability, PATH developed, translated, and disseminated high-quality, reliable, and ready-reference knowledge products, such as the Guidebook on Medical Oxygen Management, Oxygen Posters, Standard Operating Procedures, Checklists, Case Studies, and Success Stories on various aspects of the oxygen ecosystem.

This toolkit highlights how PATH’s Living Labs initiative uses a 4D human centered design approach to engage frontline immunization health care workers to understand factors that affect their motivation and engagement in providing health care services.The tools in this methodology are geared toward co-creating solutions that are in the innovation sweet spot, which is the point at which the three innovation attributes (desirability, feasibility , and viability) overlap. The tools seek to accelerate innovation and foster rapid testing and evaluation.A key aspect is to frame the problem that is, to identify and understand the user, their needs, and their context and then co create solutions that respond to those needs. Although our learned experiences largely involved frontline immunization workers, this toolkit has also been applied with community members, caregivers, community health workers, and ministry of health decision makers, as well as global development stakeholders, to address the system wide complexities of a health challenge.

A synthesis of the full review on current, published evidence relevant to single-dose HPV vaccination. This includes immunogenicity, efficacy and effectiveness; identification of gaps in the evidence; and forthcoming evidence. Visit the Single-Dose HPV Vaccine Evaluation Consortium page for additional resources.

Current live, oral rotavirus vaccines (LORVs) are reducing severe diarrhea in all settings, but they are not as effective in places with the highest burden. Alternative approaches in advanced clinical development include injectable next-generation rotavirus vaccines (iNGRVs), which have the potential to better protect children against disease, be combined with existing routine immunizations, and be even more affordable than the current LORVs. PATH conducted a series of studies to understand the real public health value of iNGRVs to help inform decisions by international agencies, funders, vaccine manufacturers, and countries. This included a feasibility and acceptability study with national stakeholders and healthcare providers in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Peru, Senegal, and Sri Lanka to assess their preferences for different hypothetical rotavirus vaccine options. These briefs provide an overview of the results in each of the study countries.