Searching the Resource Information Network

Our searching services are busy right now. Please try again later

  • Register
X
Forgot Password

If you have forgotten your password you can enter your email here and get a temporary password sent to your email.

X

Leaving Community

Are you sure you want to leave this community? Leaving the community will revoke any permissions you have been granted in this community.

No
Yes

Improving menstrual hygiene management in emergency contexts: literature review of current perspectives.

Crystal VanLeeuwen | Belen Torondel
International journal of women's health | 2018

Management of menstruation in contexts of humanitarian emergencies can be challenging. A lack of empirical research about effective interventions which improve menstrual hygiene management (MHM) among female populations in humanitarian emergencies and a lack of clarity about which sectors within a humanitarian response should deliver MHM interventions can both be attributable to the lack of clear guidance on design and delivery of culturally appropriate MHM intervention in settings of humanitarian emergencies. The objective of this review was to collate, summarize, and appraise existing peer-reviewed and gray literature that describes the current scenario of MHM in emergency contexts in order to describe the breadth and depth of current policies, guidelines, empirical research, and humanitarian aid activities addressing populations' menstrual needs. A structured-search strategy was conducted for peer-reviewed and gray literature to identify studies, published reports, guidelines, and policy papers related to menstrual response in emergency humanitarian contexts. Of the 51 articles included in the review, 16 were peer-reviewed papers and 35 were gray literature. Most of the literature agreed that hardware interventions should focus on the supply of adequate material (not only absorbent material but also other supportive material) and adequate sanitation facilities, with access to water and private space for washing, changing, drying, and disposing menstrual materials. Software interventions should focus on education in the usage of materials to manage menstruation hygienically and education about the female body's biological processes. There was clear agreement that the needs of the target population should be assessed before designing any intervention. Although there is insight about which factors should be included in an effective menstrual hygiene intervention, there is insufficient empirical evidence to establish which interventions are most effective in humanitarian emergencies and which sectors should be responsible for the coordination and implementation of such. Increased monitoring and evaluation studies of interventions should be completed and publicly shared, in order to feed evidence-based guidelines in the humanitarian sector.

Pubmed ID: 29692636

Research resources used in this publication

None found

Additional research tools detected in this publication

Antibodies used in this publication

None found

Associated grants

None

Publication data is provided by the National Library of Medicine ® and PubMed ®. Data is retrieved from PubMed ® on a weekly schedule. For terms and conditions see the National Library of Medicine Terms and Conditions.

This is a list of tools and resources that we have found mentioned in this publication.


PubMed (tool)

RRID:SCR_004846

Public bibliographic database that provides access to citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites. PubMed citations and abstracts include fields of biomedicine and health, covering portions of life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering. Provides access to additional relevant web sites and links to other NCBI molecular biology resources. Publishers of journals can submit their citations to NCBI and then provide access to full-text of articles at journal web sites using LinkOut.

View all literature mentions

EMBASE (tool)

RRID:SCR_001650

Comprehensive international bibliographic biomedical database that enables users to track and retrieve precise information on drugs and diseases from pre-clinical studies to searches on critical toxicological information. It contains bibliographic records with citations, abstracts and indexing derived from biomedical articles in peer reviewed journals, and is especially strong in its coverage of drug and pharmaceutical research. Embase can help with everything from clinical trials research to pharmacovigilance and is updated online daily and weekly. Its broad biomedical scope covers the following areas: * Drug therapy and research, including pharmaceutics, pharmacology and toxicology * Clinical and experimental (human) medicine * Basic biological science relevant to human medicine * Biotechnology and biomedical engineering, including medical devices * Health policy and management, including pharmacoeconomics * Public, occupational and environmental health, including pollution control * Veterinary science, dentistry, and nursing The Embase Application Programming Interface supports export, RSS feeds, and integration services, making it possible to share data with a wide range of systems.

View all literature mentions

Google Scholar (tool)

RRID:SCR_008878

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research. Features of Google Scholar * Search diverse sources from one convenient place * Find articles, theses, books, abstracts or court opinions * Locate the complete document through your library or on the web * Learn about key scholarly literature in any area of research How are documents ranked? Google Scholar aims to rank documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature. * Publishers - Include your publications in Google Scholar * Librarians - Help patrons discover your library''s resources

View all literature mentions