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Goal: Quebec's three mental health university institutes (DMHUI, IUSMM and the IUSMQ) and the Centre hospitalier universitaire de Sherbrooke submitted a statement to the provincial consultation forum on the 2014-2020 Mental Health Action Plan (MHAP), which was held in January 2014 and organized by the Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux (MSSS). This article presents these institutes' main recommendations., Method: Mental health university institutes deliver a wide and diverse range of services. They know about the challenges of organizing mental health services and are aware of national and international trends in the delivery of the best organizational and clinical practices in mental health. It is therefore as key stakeholders in the mental health care network that they commented on each component in the working paper., Results: The proposed orientations are consistent with the 2005-2010 MHAP. The presented themes clearly reflect current issues, although the guidelines must be more explicit regarding the vision of how services will be organized in coming years. These institutes therefore suggest that the following principles be included: the full exercise of citizenship rights, the organization of services within integrated networks, performance, continuous improvement and innovation, as well as a global and integrated vision of health. The complexity of today's problems requires flexibility, complementarity and continuity of services, particularly for youth, aboriginals, and people with concomitant disorders. These institutions therefore stress the importance of prevention, early intervention programs, and increased support for first-line general practitioners and health care professionals. They also emphasized that specialized inpatient and outpatient services should not be neglected. Community services must also be structured around various levels of support, such as ICM and ACT, as well as around specialized programs available in hospital outpatient clinics. The development and transfer of knowledge remain a central issue when it comes to improving the mental health of the general population. The consolidation of ultra-specialized services, teaching and research should be included in the next MHAP. Finally, a global health perspective must go beyond the MSSS framework to become a governmental and interministerial commitment based on a vision of public mental health that incorporates the health status of the general population and accounts for social determinants., Conclusion: It is important to have a national plan that promotes a vision. This plan must be part of an interministerial action plan that truly supports the full exercise of citizenship rights and the fight against stigmatization in collaboration with people who use these services and their families.

Background: The United States' first National Physical Activity Plan is now under development. This plan follows the release of new physical activity guidelines and seeks to address the nation's ongoing physical inactivity and obesity crisis. For this plan to be successful, all facets of American culture need to unify behind its recommendations and action steps. Guidance for this plan involves active participation from a variety of sectors, including the park, recreation, fitness, and sport (PRFS) sector., Purpose: In this white paper, we discuss the potential of the PRFS sector in addressing America's physical inactivity. Specifically, we provide a brief description, history, and scope of the PRFS sector; present evidence concerning linkages between this sector and physical activity; and discuss existing challenges and emerging opportunities for promoting physical activity. We conclude by suggesting PRFS recommendations to promote physical activity based on anticipated effectiveness, reach, scope, and sustainability., Methods: Academic articles, professional reports, and physical activity plans were reviewed to summarize the evidence concerning PRFS sector strategies for increasing physical activity., Recommendations: Based on our review, we propose several sector-specific proximity, place, program, partnership, promotion, people, policy, and performance indicator recommendations for improving physical activity in the United States.

Objective: The aim of this article was to examine the concept of mental health and the policies that have been advanced to improve the wellbeing of the population., Conclusions: In the last century there have been many changes in the phenomena of psychiatric disorder, the management of those disorders and the outcomes. All of the changes have largely been due to the efforts of those working pragmatically at the coalface. There is little to suggest that the plans and programs advanced in the last half century have achieved more than enhancing the status of those who advance them., Conclusion: It is difficult to define mental health and equally difficult to develop a comprehensive program that will benefit the whole field.

Introduction: The requirement for medical services fluctuates. This study was carried out in order to attempt to extrapolate the service requirements for various cardiology services at Mater Dei Hospital, Malta over the coming five years, based on service demands from previous years.Methods: Past annual data was obtained from hospital records for various services (to 2017). Linear regression was carried out using a bespoke Excel™ spreadsheet in order to extrapolate possible services requirements up to 2022.Results: All services are expected to increase, with forecasts ranging between 41 and 354%, depending on services being considered.Discussion: It is easy to "get on with it" and perform the work required at the workplace but this study has shown that it is equally important to anticipate demands lest lack of planning leads to long and important waiting lists for critical diagnostics and treatments. Health care provision requirements are increasing worldwide. Even using conservative estimates and in the absence of the creation of new services, the demands for extant services are likely to continue to grow. Unless medium term plans are made for hardware, software, physical space and staffing, and the funding thereof, waiting lists for investigations in this speciality are bound to rise. This may be mitigated by novel treatments but since these cannot be predicted, it would be safer and wiser to plan ahead lest we are overwhelmed. This paper has also shown how WASP (Write a Scientific Paper) precepts can be applied to elegantly study a problem and write up a paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All countries worldwide have signed up to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and have committed to the objective of achieving 'universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all'. During the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, advancement toward universal health coverage (UHC) will become more difficult for many countries, demonstrating that locally led priority setting is urgently needed to provide health services with appropriate financial protection to all. Because resources are limited and no national constituency can provide an unlimited number of services to their whole population in a sustainable manner, rationing and setting priorities for the selection of interventions to be included in a defined package of services is critical. In this Perspective, we discuss how packages of essential health services can be developed in resource-constrained settings, and detail how experts and the public can decide on principles and criteria, use a comprehensive array of analytical methods and choose which services to be provided free of charge. We illustrate these main steps while drawing on a recently conducted exercise of revising the national essential health services package in Ethiopia, which we compare with examples from other countries that have defined their essential benefits packages. This Perspective also provides recommendations for other low- and middle-income countries on their pathway to UHC.

This study explores policy makers’, health-care professionals’ and senior volunteers’ perceptions of senior volunteers. Two Norwegian government white papers regarding older adult care and welfare services, which were published over a period of 19 years, were selected for close examination. Furthermore, focus group interviews with a purposeful sample of five senior volunteers and 15 health-care professionals were conducted. The study explores the discursive formations of senior volunteers in the government white papers and how they are negotiated in the senior volunteers’ and the health-care professionals’ narratives. Two dominant discourses were presented in the white papers: a prevention discourse (in which volunteering was presented primarily as a means to prevent volunteers’ loneliness and need for care services) and a sustainability discourse (in which the volunteers were presented as instrumental in future sustainable care services). Both discourses echo a common overarching discourse about a capacity crisis due to the ageing population. The senior volunteers were positioned as partners and active agents in both their own narratives and the health-care professionals’ narratives. Their position as independent and as spokespersons for the less empowered were evident only in the senior volunteers’ own narratives. Only the health-care professionals referenced the prevention discourse and capacity issues. The senior volunteers presented themselves as competent, efficient political actors, and they resisted both the prevention and sustainability discourses. In the senior volunteers’ narratives, social and political participation were interrelated. The study demonstrates that new discursive landscapes must be created to capture the diversity among senior volunteers and their efforts. While senior volunteers must be meaningfully involved in decision making, planning and design, their positions as independent and active agents must also be ensured. Authentic partnerships between senior volunteers and public care services involve a balance between involvement and independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Community participation in health programme planning has gained traction in public health in recent decades. When an idea enters the mainstream, it becomes vulnerable to overuse and dilution, and public health professionals claiming "community participation" may intentionally or unintentionally prevent more meaningful participatory action. The principle of community-centred planning is seldom integrated into programme evaluation. We have previously argued that, to prevent ambiguity and abuse, a stronger and more explicit idea of community ownership is useful. Un-like "participation", "ownership" leaves little room for dilution., Method: This perspective piece explores a framework to support evaluating community ownership in planning, by emphasising decision-making power in health planning and management as a necessary element for evaluation alongside other outcomes. After defining the concept of community ownership, we identify and discuss challenges and research gaps related to implementing community ownership in health programme planning, management, and evaluation. Such issues include considering which communities have claims to programme ownership, alternative approaches to representation and participation that support ownership, gathering community values and preferences, and incorporating them into ongoing programme planning, management and evaluation. We consider methodological issues likely to arise when transitioning from gathering community voices - which is valuable but incomplete work - towards community decision making power in planning and evaluation., Results: We use cases from recent policy and research in Chile as examples to consider through the lens of this framework. Finally, we discuss some current constraints in implementing community ownership in healthcare planning and evaluation., Conclusion: We encourage exploring how to practice evaluation in ways that will further our ability to be helpful professional supporters of community self-determination in finding their paths to health., (© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Desert cities are special type of places that need extra environmental care and additional health planning during the process of growth and development. Special considerations and regards ought to be paid to health-related projects like building hospitals, primary health care (PHC) centers, emergency services, sanitation facilities, etc. In a country like Saudi Arabia, where deserts form a large part of the available biome, selecting which cities and places to focus on during health-related project development can be a difficult process, lacking proper ways of classifying and comparing the general health status of the population. While there are established indices to calculate other health-related qualities, like the Air Quality Health Index, there is no general health quality index. The article presented herein advocates an appropriate formula for a health quality index, HQI, as a tool for quantifying health quality for any given desert community. HQI is intended to offer a unique number, which expresses overall health quality at a certain desert locality, at a specified period of time, which is based on several quality parameters and health indicators. The objective of HQI is to turn complex health quality data into flat, simple information that is understandable and usable by health authorities, the public and desert community members. HQI depicts the composite influence of different public health quality parameters and communicates health quality information to the general public and legislative decision makers. It is intended to represent a reliable picture of the overall health quality within a particular community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Goal-setting in any practice context is vague unless the process is based on a framework that produces good goals. Popular goal-setting frameworks construct Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound (SMART) goal statements. Yet, research of how healthcare goals that are foundational to health plans are formulated is scanty. This case study explored the goal-setting practice of an organisation in Nigeria to discover the theoretical frameworks for setting the goals of their leprosy projects., Methods: The study triangulated individual semi-structured interviews of 10 leprosy managers with a review of their project plans and a participant observation of the organisation's annual planning event. A five-stage thematic analysis was used to serially identify, code, and integrate goal-setting themes from the data collected., Findings: This produced three final emergent themes: stakeholders, strategy, and goal statements, with 11 associated conceptual frameworks. All were further theoretically integrated into one general framework that illustrates the organisational goal-setting practice at the time of study. This revealed a practice with a four-staged linear centre-driven process that led to a top-down, problem-based goal formulation, and produced assigned project plans based on hierarchical non-SMART goal statements., Conclusion: Collaborative goal-setting process is proposed for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timed, and Agreeable statements of project objectives and aims written with Change, Beneficiaries, Indicator, Target, Timeframe and Change, Beneficiaries, Location, and Timeframe models respectively., (© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

People with learning disabilities are living longer. Older people with learning disabilities should be included in policies and plans that are for all older people. National plans and policies for older people often do not say anything about older people with learning disabilities, and it is hard to know whether older people with learning disabilities are benefiting. People who plan services locally often do not have good information on older people with learning disabilities. Using the Equalities Act 2010 could help people who plan services and write policy to think about older people with learning disabilities but this is not happening at the moment. People who work with older people with learning disabilities should be aware of policy for all older people, so that older people with learning disabilities do not miss out. This paper seeks to explore the opportunities and challenges generated by current policy, guidance and legislation in England relating to older people, in terms of the practical implications for older people with learning disabilities. Using the broad themes housing, employment, social inclusion and isolation, care and support, and promoting better health and well-being, this paper discusses potential practical opportunities and concerns for older people with learning disabilities arising from policy and legislation such as current initiatives regarding integration, personalisation and the dementia policy. Consideration is given to the implications of changing policy and practice for both current and future generations of people with a learning disability as they reach older age. This discussion paper concludes that whilst there is potential for older people with a learning disability to benefit from policy and practice aimed at improving the lives of older people generally, the tendency for policy to be targeted at specific groups without adequately considering the diversity of those groups often leaves those with a learning disability at the margins of being able to make the most of changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Steering health systems towards universal health coverage requires research on themes that are of particular interest to health planning, management, policy and systems researchers. Some issues, such as strikes regarded as illegal and health sector corruption, because of their social and political sensitivity have, for too long, remained outside adequate research inquiry. Their emergence in the research agenda raises some challenges for Human Research Ethics Committees, particularly related to their conflicts of interests as reviewers, that need clarification., (© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)