Donald J . Boyd, Hamil ton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, and James H. Wyckoff School districts are confronting difficult choices in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In prior recessions, districts often muddled through by imposing a combination of tax increases and expenditure cuts that avoided involuntary personnel reductions. Today, the financial imbalance in many school districts is so larg...

The study was conducted in rural settings in the districts of Alwar and Tonk in Rajasthan, India. With 41 percent of 15-19-year-old girls and 15 percent of boys already married, the state of Rajasthan records the highest rates of early marriage among all states in India. The study districts were purposely selected to represent contrasting situations with respect to rates of early marriage Alwar...

OBJECTIVE To quantify staff requirements in primary health care facilities in South Africa through an adaptation of the WHO workload indicator of staff needs tool. METHODS We use a model to estimate staffing requirements at primary health care facilities. The model integrates several empirically-based assumptions including time and type of health worker required for each type of consultation,...

OBJECTIVE The Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) strategy is designed to address the five leading causes of childhood mortality, which together account for 70% of the 10 million deaths occurring among children worldwide annually. Although IMCI is associated with improved quality of care, which is a key determinant of better health outcomes, it has not yet been widely adopted, par...

Background Decentralisation in the health sector has been promoted in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) for many years. Inherently, decentralisation grants decision-making space to local level authorities over different functions such as: finance, human resources, service organization, and governance. However, there is paucity of studies which have assessed the actual use of decisi...

BACKGROUND Numerous area-based initiatives (ABIs) have been implemented in deprived neighbourhoods across Europe. These large-scale initiatives aim to tackle the socio-economic and environmental problems in these areas that might influence physical activity (PA). There is little robust evidence of their impact on PA. This study aimed to assess the impact of a Dutch ABI called the District Appro...

BACKGROUND As part of efforts to reduce maternal deaths in Karnataka state, India, there has been a concerted effort to increase institutional deliveries. However, little is known about the quality of care in these healthcare facilities. We investigated the availability and distribution of emergency obstetric care (EmOC) services in eight northern districts of Karnataka state in south India. ...