A comprehensive, best practices resource for public health and healthcare practitioners and students interested in humanitarian emergencies.

Adolescents in Humanitarian Crisis investigates the experiences of adolescents displaced by humanitarian crisis. The world is currently seeing unprecedented levels of mass displacement, and almost half of the world’s 70 million displaced people are children and adolescents under the age of 18. Displacement for adolescents comes with huge disruption to their education and employment prospects, as well as increased risks of poor psychosocial outcomes and sexual and gender-based violence for girls. Considering these intersectional vulnerabilities throughout, this book explores the experiences of adolescents from refugee, internally displaced persons and stateless communities in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Rwanda. Drawing on innovative mixed-methods research, the book investigates adolescent capabilities, including education, health and nutrition, freedom from violence and bodily integrity, psychosocial wellbeing, voice and agency, and economic empowerment. Centring the diverse voices and experiences of young people and focusing on how policy and programming can be meaningfully improved, this book will be a vital guide for humanitarian students and researchers, and for practitioners seeking to build effective, evidence-based policy. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003167013, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) is a term used to describe a wide range of actions that address social, psychological and psychiatric problems that are either pre-existing or emergency-induced. These actions are carried out in highly different contexts by organizations and people with different professional backgrounds, in different sectors and with different types of resources. All these different actors--and their donors--need practical assessments leading to recommendations that can be used immediately to improve people's mental health and well-being. Although a range of assessment tools exist, what has been missing is an overall approach that clarifies when to use which tool for what purpose. This document offers an approach to assessment that should help you review information that is already available and only collect new data that will be of practical use, depending on your capacity and the phase of the humanitarian crisis. This document is rooted in two policy documents, the IASC Reference Group s (2010) "Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Humanitarian Emergencies: What Should Humanitarian Health Actors Know?" and the "Sphere Handbook's Standard on Mental Health" (Sphere Project, 2011). It is written primarily for public health actors. As the social determinants of mental health and psychosocial problems occur across sectors, half of the tools in the accompanying toolkit cover MHPSS assessment issues relevant to other sectors as well as the health sector.

In the devastation that follows a major disaster, there is a need for multiple sectors to unite and devote new resources to support the rebuilding of infrastructure, the provision of health and social services, the restoration of care delivery systems, and other critical recovery needs. In some cases, billions of dollars from public, private and charitable sources are invested to help communities recover. National rhetoric often characterizes these efforts as a "return to normal." But for many American communities, pre-disaster conditions are far from optimal. Large segments of the U.S. population suffer from preventable health problems, experience inequitable access to services, and rely on overburdened health systems. A return to pre-event conditions in such cases may be short-sighted given the high costs - both economic and social - of poor health. Instead, it is important to understand that the disaster recovery process offers a series of unique and valuable opportunities to improve on the status quo. Capitalizing on these opportunities can advance the long-term health, resilience, and sustainability of communities - thereby better preparing them for future challenges. Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Communities After Disasters identifies and recommends recovery practices and novel programs most likely to impact overall community public health and contribute to resiliency for future incidents. This book makes the case that disaster recovery should be guided by a healthy community vision, where health considerations are integrated into all aspects of recovery planning before and after a disaster, and funding streams are leveraged in a coordinated manner and applied to health improvement priorities in order to meet human recovery needs and create healthy built and natural environments. The conceptual framework presented in Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Communities After Disasters lays the groundwork to achieve this goal and provides operational guidance for multiple sectors involved in community planning and disaster recovery. Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Communities After Disasters calls for actions at multiple levels to facilitate recovery strategies that optimize community health. With a shared healthy community vision, strategic planning that prioritizes health, and coordinated implementation, disaster recovery can result in a communities that are healthier, more livable places for current and future generations to grow and thrive - communities that are better prepared for future adversities.

There have always been homeless people in the United States, but their plight has only recently stirred widespread public reaction and concern. Part of this new recognition stems from the problem's prevalence: the number of homeless individuals, while hard to pin down exactly, is rising. In light of this, Congress asked the Institute of Medicine to find out whether existing health care programs were ignoring the homeless or delivering care to them inefficiently. This book is the report prepared by a committee of experts who examined these problems through visits to city slums and impoverished rural areas, and through an analysis of papers written by leading scholars in the field.

On 20 November 2009, the global community celebrates the 20th anniversary of the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the unique document that sets international standards for the care, treatment and protection of all individuals below age 18. To celebrate this landmark, the United Nations Children's Fund is dedicating a special edition of its flagship report The State of the World's Children to examining the Convention's evolution, progress achieved on child rights, challenges remaining, and actions to be taken to ensure that its promise becomes a reality for all children.