User:ChristopherLKunin/The Lives Saved Tool

=The Lives Saved Tool=

The Lives Saved tool (LiST), is a model designed to test the impact of scaling up health and nutrition interventions, on child, newborn, and maternal health. It was designed by the Institute for international programs at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg school of public health, and was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Lives Saved tool is a linked model with the Program Spectrum(a collection of models designed to give policymakers an estimate of the outcomes of their policies.) Since it's creation LiST has been updated regularly and now can predict impacts on stillbirths, maternal mortality, and pneumonia and diarrhea incidence. It is available as a part of the public domain in as a part of SPECTRUM.

How LiST Works and How it is Used
LiST has been used extensively to predict the impact and effectiveness of particular interventions on infant mortality, to help emphasize the need to refocus priorities, to set goals on a global level, or in many developing countries to guide planning processes for policy makers trying to reduce mortality rates.

The basic framework of LiST is a linear deterministic mathematical model that, measures the outcome of interventions on Maternal mortality, Stillbirths, Birth outcomes, Nutrition outcomes and Neonatal and child mortality.

What separates LiST from many other Intervention prediction tools is that LiST can measure the effects of multiple intervention methods simultaneously. As of right now LiST is built with over 80 intervention methods, and data from over 85 low and middle income countries. The variety of available interventions and the fact that they can be projected together allows policy makers, researchers, and other LiST users the ability to track intervention methods in combonation with each other to test possible positive and negative effects of a combonation of two or more interventions.

LiST and SPECTRUM
Since LiST has become a feature of the multi issue predictive software SPECTRUM, the variety of measurable interventions has gone up. Because of it is linked with SPECTRUM's module DemProj, LiST can now model infant mortality issues and the effect of interventions by demographic, based on UN data for over 190 countries and regions. In addition now linked with Fam Plan a Module which projects family planning requirements needed to reach national goals for addressing unmet need or achieving desired fertility, the cross effects of impacts of intervention methods in both that sector and the sector of infant mortality can be measured. The final module from SPECTRUM to link to LiST is AIM, or the AIDs impact Model, which projects the consequences of the HIV epidemic, including the number of people living with HIV, new infections, and AIDS deaths by age and sex; as well as the new cases of tuberculosis and AIDS orphans. These modules allow LiST intervention data to be more diverse and specific in nature allowing policy makers understand more of the causes for infant mortality, both regionally and globally.

Criticism and review of LiST
In a study in 2014, a team of researchers used the Lives Saved Tool to to identify priority areas for maternal and neonatal health services, by formulating six individual and combined interventions scenarios for two countries: Bangladesh and Uganda. The researchers worked with the governments of these countries using the Lives Saved Tool as a baseline. In review the study was mostly positive however it did point out that LiST should be used as a baseline to determine effective intervention methods rather than