Investing wisely in child survival with the Lives Saved Tool (LiST)
Publisher/Organizer: John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Publication date: 2010
Language: English
Overview
“The International Journal of Epidemiology published a special issue today chronicling the development and recent use of the Lives Saved Tool (LiST)—a user-friendly computer program that helps donor agencies and governments make investments in child survival programs for maximum impact. LiST was developed in the Child Health Epidemiology Research Group (CHERG) with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.
Millions of mothers and children die every year because they do not receive basic care. While it is currently impossible to provide comprehensive care to all of them, LiST shows what interventions have the potential to avert the most deaths. The computer program can provide information for specific countries and regions based on estimates of disease burden and intervention effectiveness. The articles in this issue present the underlying modeling approach used to develop LiST, reviews of specific intervention effectiveness incorporated into the program, and examples of LiST predictions compared to observed results.
Years of work by the CHERG, an independent reference group for UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO), provide the foundation for calculations performed by LiST, and many of the articles included in the supplement address the effectiveness of specific interventions upon which estimates are based