Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
Breastfeeding practices of factory workers in a peer counseling intervention group were significantly better than those in the control group. Factories employing female workers should consider providing skilled community‐based peer counselors to improve infant health outcomes.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
Guidance during the pandemic should weigh risks posed by COVID-19 transmission against the protection provided by skin-to-skin contact, early initiation of breastfeeding, continued breastfeeding, and rooming-in. Recommendations against these practices should not be made without compelling evidence.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
An examination of literature on complementary feeding interventions in lower- and middle-income countries since 2000, this scoping review considered 64 behavior change interventions. Across the interventions, authors identified 28 out of a possible 93 behavior change techniques (BCTs), estimating effectiveness ratios for each. Certain BCTs showed promise and warrant further evaluation.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
The pandemic presents opportunities to accelerate introduction and scale-up of multiple micronutrient, balanced energy-protein, and small-quantity lipid nutrient supplements. Strategies to prevent interruption of essential health and nutrition services, maintain an adequate food supply, and mitigate impacts of the economic crisis exist, but there are insufficient data on the efficiency and effectiveness of mitigation measures in health, food, and social protection systems.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
A comprehensive primary health care platform should be used to address malnutrition. Priority actions include encouraging primary health care providers to support multi-sectoral action on nutrition, empowering communities and patients to address unhealthy diets, and ensuring delivery of high-quality nutrition interventions.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
Gaps include an agreed-upon definition of adolescence, standardized anthropometric definitions of malnutrition, data on current and optimal diets, evidence on effective interventions for adolescents, adolescent engagement in research, inclusion of adolescents within health and nutrition policies, and designated research funding.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
Results of a review by USAID Advancing Nutrition emphasize the importance of promoting responsive caregiving and early learning, and supplementing training to ensure that health workers can tailor counseling to individual breastfeeding challenges, particularly in emergency contexts. Training to encourage greater consumption of unprocessed or minimally processed foods and reduced consumption of foods with limited nutritional value may also be appropriate.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
Estimating expected caseload using a single standard estimate fails to capture variations due to seasonality, disease trends, food insecurity levels, and the instability of a crisis setting. Context-specific modeling indicates that previous calculations significantly underestimate the burden of wasting.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
This wide-ranging review finds that community health workers (CHWs) often carry out critical emergency response activities but face security threats and psychological trauma. Community selection of CHWs is crucial for acceptance and high service utilization. Providing buffer stocks to CHWs, storing commodities in decentralized locations, addressing bottlenecks to CHW service delivery, and completing rigorous assessments of primary health care interventions are critical.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
Rapid response to nutrition crises must balance scale-up demands with support for existing systems and capacities. This requires strong coordination to ensure government ownership, prevent duplication of services, improve data quality, and track and forecast supply needs. Longer-term flexible donor funding to support greater integration of services, as well as efforts to simplify reporting and improve tools, supervision, and capacity-building approaches could improve service delivery.