Comment
2418 www.thelancet.com Vol 392 December 8, 2018
Access to afordable, quality-assured essential med-
icines is a prerequisite for efective universal health
coverage.
1,2
Eforts to ensure comprehensive access to
essential medicines have been hindered by a dearth of
information. Most monitoring eforts have focused on
measurement of a prespecifed list of essential medicines
in health facilities. Measures of afordability in private
and public health facilities have relied on periodic
surveys, usually by non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) or academia.
3
The quality of medicine products
A global accountability mechanism for access to essential
medicines
layperson could be more infuential and less threatening
in changing students’ and teachers’ practices.
This option raises implications for resourcing. With
schools increasingly employing nurses, social workers,
and school counsellors, is there potential to employ youth
workers, health promoters, or cultural support workers
to enhance school wellbeing? Could these non-teaching
staf lose their ability to challenge the status quo in
schools if they become internal employees with teachers
as their managers? Careful negotiation of these roles and
management will be needed to ensure the legitimacy
of their roles as part of the school environment while
maintaining their independence and ability to challenge.
Third, there are several aspects that require further
development and evaluation. For example, can the
programme be enhanced to improve areas that were
relatively resistant to change—eg, aggressive behaviours
and perpetration of bullying in the INCLUSIVE trial? What
might explain the diferent efects by gender in these
trials, and to what extent might intervention efects vary
by age, ethnicity, religion, or other diferences?
Finally, some school health promotion messages can
appear incongruous, and be less efective, in the context
of wider societal norms. About 720 million school-aged
children live in countries where corporal punishment
at school is not fully prohibited.
3
Although they found
favourable efects on drinking, the investigators of the
INCLUSIVE trial suggest that the lack of efect on sexual
health could be due to these behaviours typically occurring
outside school. The difculties in improving sexual health
might lie in social taboos and cultural norms that prevent
open and honest discussions with adolescents about
relationships, consent, and safer sexual behaviour without
resorting to shaming or use of scare tactics.
Notwithstanding issues that require further
attention, both trials provide compelling evidence to
target investments and resources to enhance school
environments as a social determinant of health
amenable to modifcation.
*Shanthi Ameratunga, Terryann Clark, Prerna Banati
School of Population Health, Faculty of Medical & Health Sciences
(SA), and School of Nursing (TC), University of Auckland,
Auckland 1142, New Zealand; Manaia Primary Health
Organization, Whāngarei, New Zealand (TC); UNICEF Ofce of
Research – Innocenti, Florence, Italy (PB)
s.ameratunga@auckland.ac.nz
We declare no competing interests.
Copyright © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open
Access article under the CC BY 4.0 license.
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