Strength And Weakness Of Community Health Intervention

The overall positive outcomes of the interventions suggest that the interventions were reasonably well implemented. Reporting of the implementation process however was heterogeneous and in general a lack of reporting was noted.

The overall trends that could be observed were a consumer-targeted approach in the implementation process. Most interventions were delivering information and education to the crisis-affected communities. This was done through media campaigns, as well as through community outreach and peer workers. Skills and competencies development, such as negotiation skills for safer sex and infant feeding skills was another target.

Developing personal skills is a strategy of disaster management represented by the provision of information

Reproductive health interventions need early, high level, governmental commitment, assistance from international NGOS and donors and a multi-sectoral implementation process involving community engagement and strengthening, in order to achieve a residual, sustainable result.

Strengths and Limitations

The strengths of this study are that a relatively broad search strategy was used including a hand search of grey literature. There was no exclusion based on the study design, broadening the possibility of relevant findings. There are a number of limitations in this study.

Articles that could have been of potential importance could have been missed due to the relatively specific inclusion criteria and only articles published in English, German or French were considered for this review. PMTCT and gender-based violence programs could have been missed, because of the nature of the search terms not specifically including this type of HIV transmission and terms.

Furthermore, this study only includes published articles and numerous work done in humanitarian settings is not published, due to various reason, like researchers not having the time to sit down and produce a paper

Conclusion

This review found some evidence to support the success of education-based interventions relating to HIV risk-reducing behaviour changes. Antenatal clinics and their PMTCT programs are accepted and used by the community, if they are of reasonable quality and have been successful in reducing the rate of mother-to-child HIV transmission.

Gender-based violence prevention programs show slow and small but promising progress towards decreasing violence on women, inflicted by men by targeting men and making it a community, rather than simply a women’s issue and promoting gender-equitable beliefs.

However, the types of study design, limited use of statistical data, and weak quality mean caution needs to be exercised when interpreting results.

Reporting of government, financial, delivery arrangements and implementation strategies has been very heterogeneous and incomplete. More emphasis on reporting and efforts towards homogenous reporting techniques to describe implementation strategies should be