The British Paediatric Association (BPA) has carried out a national survey of paediatric medical manpower in the hospital and community child health services. The results of the survey relating to England and Wales are presented and compared with Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) manpower statistics. On the basis of the survey findings and current trends in the pattern of paediatr...

Virtual communities are groups of people with similar interests who meet online and together act as a learning environment, place for social support, or as bodies for influencing public opinion. In this paper, the authors identify characteristics of a virtual community that influence its members to customize eservices provided to or received by the virtual community. The authors propose a theor...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effects of a postnatal home-visiting programme delivered by community health nurses to socially disadvantaged mothers in South Australia. DESIGN The intervention group of 428 mothers lived in metropolitan Adelaide and the comparison group of 239 mothers lived in regional towns where the programme was not yet available. All participating mothers met health service eli...

Universal health coverage is gaining momentum and is likely to form a core part of the post Millennium Development Goal (MDG) agenda and be linked to social determinants of health, including gender; Close to community health providers are arguably key players in meeting the goal of universal health coverage through extending and delivering health services to poor and marginalised groups; Close ...

OGSA-DAI provides an extensible framework that allows data resources to be incorporated into Grid fabrics. The current OGSA-DAI release, version 3.0, is a complete top-to-bottom redesign and implementation of the OGSA-DAI product. A number of fundamental conceptual and design changes are introduced in this release. In this paper we describe the motivation behind this redesign and provide an ove...

Manual handling injuries represented both the highest costs and largest proportion of workers compensation claims for the South Australian Department of Human Services from 1995 to 1999 (Risk Management Services 2000). There is evidence to suggest the manutention method of manual handling training can reduce workplace injuries. A retrospective audit of injuries was conducted at Metropolitan Dom...

Virtual communities of patients provide health-related information and mutual support for members. This paper presents a structured analysis of virtual communities of patients and the demand for novel electronic services. Results include success factors of virtual communities of patients, the structural relations between success factors, demand for new and long-term members and newly and long-t...

BACKGROUND The need to scale up treatment for HIV/AIDS has led to a revival in community health workers to help alleviate the health human resource crisis in sub-Saharan Africa. Community health workers have been employed in Mozambique since the 1970s, performing disparate and fragmented activities, with mixed results. METHODS A participant-observer description of the evolution of community h...

Recent attention to the question of ‘what works?’ in supporting desistance, coupled with the emergence of a number of research studies which suggest that Community Service (CS) might be effective in reducing recidivism, has contributed to growing interest in the rehabilitative potential of CS. Informed by this context, this paper reports on the findings of a small scale Scottish study which set...

In October 2009, authors, staff, and guest experts from the Mobilizing Action Toward Community Health (MATCH) project and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the project’s funder, met in Madison, Wisconsin to discuss metrics, incentives, and partnerships for population health improvement. Their essays were published in this and the previous 2 issues of Preventing Chronic Disease (www.cdc.gov/pc...