Thursday, 25 August 2011
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The Lives Saved Tool (LiST) has been developed to estimate the impact of health interventions and can consider multiple interventions simultaneously. This new computer-based tool allows users to set up and run multiple scenarios to look at the estimated impact of different intervention packages and coverage levels for their countries, states or districts. These scenarios, developed with the LiST tool, provide a structured format for program managers or ministry of health personnel to combine the best scientific information about effectiveness of interventions for maternal, neonatal and child health with information about cause of death and current coverage of interventions to inform their planning and decision-making, to help prioritize investments and evaluate existing programs. The LiST tool is meant to be used as part of the planning process—not as a replacement for planning. The model has its origins in earlier work from the Lancet Series papers that looked at estimating the impact of increasing coverage of proven interventions on child mortality and neonatal mortality as well as the impact of interventions related to nutrition and nutritional status of mothers and children. During the past four years, LiST has been developed into a free, open access software tool that has been used by programs or organizations to estimate the impact of scaling up different interventions and thereby help in the health planning process. BMC Public Health has an entire supplement carrying articles on this tool: http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcpublichealth/11?issue=s3 Evaluating the tool, Robert Steinglass et al point out that “Without thorough guidance about how to modify or use the tool, so that a typical user can model the number of lives being saved with continued successful use of an intervention at baseline (by showing ‘lives lost’) plus additional lives saved if coverage increases, we fear that LiST will be viewed by decision makers as ‘turn-key’. It could also run the risk of being used as a stand-alone tool rather than as part of a series of planning tools as apparently intended. Their responses can be accessed here along with the authors’ responses.
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