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Microplanning manual to help countries and partners tackle NTDs more effectively
WHO’s Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases (WHO/NTD) has launched a microplanning guide, intended to help countries, key partners, and other stakeholders in the global fight against NTDs.
The Microplanning manual to guide implementation of preventive chemotherapy to control and eliminate neglected tropical diseases is a comprehensive document and is intended to help NTD programmes with all aspects of the operational planning and implementation required for live-saving interventions, such as mass drug administration.
Neglected tropical diseases affect more than 1 billion people globally, causing serious, long-term health effects. They also disproportionately affect the poorest communities in the world, bringing further devastation to people already suffering the effects of poverty and deprivation.
Timely and effective interventions, including preventive chemotherapy – administering medicines to prevent disease occurrence – can reduce the burden for millions and millions of people the world over.
Organising and implementing such administration on a massive scale, however, requires careful, meticulous, bottom-up planning. The importance of local knowledge and understanding cannot be overestimated and WHO’s new manual has learned from the best and most effective examples of mass treatment, including mass vaccination programmes, to develop strategies and tools that can help all those whose mission it is to get much needed treatments to populations in the greatest need.
In the last few years, over 1 billion people globally have received treatment for at least one NTD – a truly remarkable achievement. We know, then, that we can deliver treatments and interventions on the massive scale required to make a difference. The challenge now, for us all, is to refine our systems to make them even better.
WHO’s new microplanning manual aims to help programme managers and health ministries to do just that, encouraging them to learn from the experiences of others and refine their own strategies to reach as many people as possible and leave no one behind.