Background Informal payments for health care, which are common in many countries, can have negative effects on health care access, equity and health status as they lead people to forgo or delay seeking care, or to sell assets to pay for care. Many countries are putting reforms in place with the aim of reducing informal payments. In order to be successful, such policies should be informed by the...

This chapter presents a static diagnosis tool that locates type errors in untyped CLP programs without executing them. The existing prototype is specialised for the programming language CHIP [4.10], but the idea applies to any CLP language. The tool works with approximated speci cations which describe types of procedure calls and successes. The speci cations are expressed as a certain kind of t...

Background: Informal payments can cause delayed access to health care services, forcing people to sell their properties for cost of treatment; and as a result, they lose trust in the health system. Considering the importance of this issue, this study was conducted in 2016 to identify solutions to reduce and eliminate informal payments in Iran’s health system.    Methods: Initia...

The study examined the sources of informal finance in aiding climate change adaptation in South eastern Nigeria. Random sampling was adopted in the selection of 6 out of the 9 communities in the study area. From each of these selected communities, 10 crop farmers were randomly selected giving a total number of 60 respondents. Descriptive statistics such as percentages and frequency, as well as ...

BACKGROUND The inverse care law proposing that medical services are distributed inversely to population health needs, and that this law operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces, was first suggested by Tudor Hart in 1971. This paper considers whether an inverse care law can be observed for the provision of informal care as well as for medical care. AIM Using...

The paper discusses the shift to narrative studies and the growth of biographical research in the social sciences as a way of knowing persons. Dangers inherent in false assumptions of knowledge of interviewing and semi-structured probes are noted. The author's experience with the Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method is discussed, using examples from his research on identity and the informal...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Approximately 9000 people in the UK are affected by Huntington's disease (HD). People with HD require ongoing health and social care support. There is a knowledge gap about costs of health and social care use associated with HD in the UK. This paper estimates the economic cost in the UK. METHODS Data on UK patients for the year 2013 were extracted from the European Hunt...