Significance Statement Clause Examples

Significance Statement. A study of the effectiveness of the feeding toolkit to improve volume and consistency of complementary child feeding to reduce stunting will be implemented in Mchinji district. This formative research which aimed to assess the acceptability and feasibility of the feeding toolkit is a key component of the effectiveness study. There is evidence of acceptability and feasibility of this feeding toolkit in other contexts, but not in Malawi (▇▇▇▇ et al., 2015 ; ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ et al., 2015). Findings from this study will contribute to existing evidence on the acceptability and feasibility of the feeding toolkit in low income countries. Additionally, the data obtained may provide baseline information to help refine the design of the effectiveness study and may also offer an explanation to outcomes of the effectiveness study.

Significance Statement. This research is innovative in its intersecting of the COVID-19 pandemic with food and nutrition security among vulnerable populations, an emergency grant program in LMICs, and workplace- based nutrition programming. More over, it is timely. The COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented and has left countless people worldwide grappling for answers on how best to slow its spread, mitigate its impact, and ultimately recover from its ongoing social, economic, and political disruptions. One such ongoing disruption has been observed in global food supply chains. The U.S. Global Leadership Coalition has found that the pandemic has exacerbated food insecurity in almost all countries through a combination of reduced household income and food supply chain disruptions. Per the World Food Programme, in the two years since its onset, the number of people experiencing severe food insecurity has double from 135 million before the pandemic to 276 million. This number is estimated to rise to 323 million by the end of 2022 due to the compounding effects of ongoing global crises aggravated by the pandemic (▇▇▇▇ et al., 20220) Workforce centered nutrition interventions offer a unique pathway through which such pandemic induced nutritional challenges can be addressed. While workforce nutrition is not a novel phenomenon, now more than ever, it can be leveraged by many employers as a tool to bring awareness and access to nutritional health. This approach is significant for several reasons. Namely, an estimated 58% of the global population will spend one-third of their adults lives at work and can therefore be easily and frequently reached via workplace nutrition efforts (The Workforce Nutrition Alliance, 2020). Additionally, healthy workforces have been associated with improved company outputs indicating the mutually beneficial nature of workforce nutrition for employers and workers. Lastly, there is no finite time frame for the COVID-19 pandemic, new variants have continued to emerge resulting in recurrent spikes in infection cases globally. This has in turn prolonged the world’s economic and health systems recovery.

Significance Statement. While the purpose and objective of a public health surveillance system may be clear, challenges to design, implement, operate and evolve technical systems to support the increasing data demands to support surveillance objectives is ever more complex and must keep pace with the speed of technological advances. This project-based thesis presents an innovative technique of technical documentation developed in service of a complex global public health surveillance network that may offer a more comprehensive, versatile, and intelligible illustration technique to capture the flow of surveillance data, potentially disrupting conventional techniques within the industry.

Significance Statement. Improving CVD interventions at health facilities leads to alleviation of disease burden and improvement in quality of lives among affected people. NCDs, including CVDs, reduce productivity and contribute to poverty, create a significant burden on health systems, and lead to a growing economic burden on national economies (WHO, 2010a). Additionally, CVDs have specific characteristics that further aggravate this burden, including that CVDs are to a large extent incurable and affected people live with their disease for a long period of time. This means that long-term interventions would require large amounts of money to be spent, but prevention of CVDs would actually save governments money in the long term. Against the negative impacts of NCDs, priority has to be given for implementing interventions that have a low cost but high impact and provide a good return on investment. Regarding CVD, it has been estimated that a regimen of aspirin, statin and blood pressure-lowering agents may significantly reduce the risk of death from CVD in people at high cardiovascular risk. Providing such a regimen to those eligible between 40–79 years of age has been estimated to avert about one fifth of cardiovascular deaths in the next 10 years, with 56% of deaths averted in people younger than 70 years. With effective management, the average yearly cost per head of implementing such a regimen has been estimated to range from US$ 0·43 to US$ 0·90 in low-income countries (▇▇▇ et al., 2007).

Significance Statement. Since the establishment of the NBCCEDP in 1991, the United States federal government has devoted considerable financial and human resources to improve cervical cancer screening rates among underserved women. Although the program has made inroads in providing screening and diagnostic services to its priority population of low income, uninsured/underinsured, and minority women, recent research reveals that screening disparities still exist among program-eligible women.

Significance Statement. The study is expected to evaluate actual barriers to the utilization of the LLINs, problem of low LLIN coverage and the effect of the door-to-door hang-up process on increasing household use of the LLINs and sleeping space coverage in the Nord-Ubangi province. Through a process of evaluating this mass distribution campaign of the LLINs in the Nord-Ubangi province, DRC, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other malaria programs can understand how better to implement a comprehensive mass distribution campaign of the bed nets to increase coverage and utilization, and improve the door-to-door hang-up activities for community-based malaria prevention. Malaria prevention programs can use the evaluation results to improve door-to-door hang- up process during the mass distribution campaign of LLINs if needed. In addition, the findings of this evaluation will provide a springboard for more comprehensive methods to increase use and coverage of the bed nets in DRC. With the knowledge gained from this study, non-governmental organizations can increase awareness of LLINs, educate communities on use of LLINs, train more community health workers on the door-to-door hang-up process, and reach the objective of maintaining sleeping space coverage at or above 80 percent.

Significance Statement. Social media platforms have become novel sources of health-related data, providing public health practitioners with real-time data on a range of health issues that span from influenza infection “hot spots” to natural disasters to postpartum depression (Hill et al., 2013). Twitter, in particular, is becoming a more common tool to use to mine public health data, due to its immediacy and the fact that by default, “tweets” are public. While recent studies have started exploring the use of Twitter as a surveillance tool for prescription drug misuse in general, to the best of my knowledge, no research has focused on prescription opioid misuse, particularly as it relates to documented geographic surveillance patterns. If results of this study indicate that Twitter trends related to discussion about prescription opioid use and misuse may reflect actual trends occurring in certain geographic areas, public health officials may be able to use Twitter as a predictor of misuse activity, allowing them to intervene quickly and potentially save lives by reducing deaths from overdose.

Significance Statement. I use an innovative qualitative data source, namely fictional narratives, to tap into image- rich social representations of HIV & AIDS. Narratives provide insight into how people make sense of the world, and how they communicate those understandings to others in their cultural community (▇▇▇▇▇▇, 1990). The analysis is broadly situated within the Theory of Social Representations (Moscovici 1981; Joffe and Bettega 2003) which focuses on the complex symbolic, emotive and social aspects of everyday lay meaning- making. Social representations communicate norms and values in symbolic form. They are often pre-conscious and therefore less subject to informant bias than conscious evaluative judgments like attitudes. Narratives have been identified as a particularly valuable and underused data source for the study of social representations (Laszlo 1997; ▇▇▇▇▇▇ 2002). This study is situated within a multi-country research process on young Africans‟ narratives about HIV & AIDS (Winskell and ▇▇▇▇▇ 2009). In their stories, young people draw on their own lived or imagined experience and on other culturally-determined sources of social understanding to create context, meaning and values (Winskell 2011). Thus, the Scenarios from Africa narratives provide unique insights into young people‟s explanatory models about HIV & AIDS, and into their appropriation of dominant cultural norms around gender, sexuality and stigma (Winskell 2011).

Significance Statement. Investigating these attitudes would provide a more detaILEd understanding of abortion access across the state and, eventually, inform policy and structural changes to improve health outcomes for millions of women.