In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) tapped SARAVYC for urgent support.
Background
WHO’s Department of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health is currently developing a global guideline on school health services, and the Guidelines Development Group (GDG) is chaired by Dr. Elizabeth Saewyc. As one step in guideline development, WHO wanted to consult school health experts around the world, but at a relatively late stage, the GDG really felt the survey should be offered in WHO’s six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.
WHO’s internal services for translating and administering such a survey were already booked for months in advance, so it looked like it might not have been possible to get the survey out in time in multiple languages. But SARAVYC research staff had both the expertise to program the online survey, and the ability to get speedy translations from Qualtrics services (for a fee), so WHO contracted us to get the translations, program the survey, launch it to more than 1400 experts identified across the world, and prepare the preliminary results for reporting back — all in 6 weeks!
What’s Next
Results from the survey were used to help the GDG prioritize which promotion, prevention, care, and treatment interventions to recommend in global school health services, an important element of the guidelines. WHO is now preparing the guidelines document, and after it is released, the SARAVYC team will work with colleagues from WHO to develop a peer-reviewed paper with the more detailed analyses of the survey findings.
