BACKGROUND Early initiation of antenatal care (ANC) can reduce common maternal complications and maternal and perinatal mortality. Though Rwanda demonstrated a remarkable decline in maternal mortality and 98% of Rwandan women receive antenatal care from a skilled provider, only 38% of women have an ANC visit in their first three months of pregnancy. This study assessed factors associated with d...

introduction: hospitals performance indicators will help monitoring, evaluation and decision making and therefore must be selected and ranked accurately. the aim of present study is identifying and selecting key hospitals performance indicators. materials and methods: this is a descriptive and mixed (quantitative-qualitative) study. literature review and expert panel has been done to identify a...

BACKGROUND The target date for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is now closer than ever. There is lack of sufficient progress in achieving the MDG targets in many low- and middle-income countries. Furthermore, there has also been concerns about wide spread inequity among those that are on track to achieve the health-related MDGs. Bangladesh has made a notable progress towards a...

BACKGROUND Improving and sustaining the quality of care in hospitals is an intractable and persistent challenge. The patients' experience of the quality of hospital care can provide insightful feedback to enable clinical teams to direct quality improvement efforts in areas where they are most needed. Yet, patient experience is often marginalised in favour of aspects of care that are easier to q...

Consistent individual effort in engagement in HIV medical services has been associated with positive health outcomes in people living with HIV (PLHIV). However, whether these benefits are facilitated by improved medication adherence has not been widely studied. This study aimed to investigate the marginal effect of engagement in HIV care on medication adherence at a public health facility in Ke...

BACKGROUND User fees are a known common barrier to using health services, particularly among the poor. When fees are present, many facilities have waiver systems for poor patients to exempt them from paying. Targeting waivers to patients who need them most has been a challenge, especially in fragile states, where relevant data are limited and trust in institutions is low. METHODS Community-ba...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate student pharmacists' impact on health fair participant knowledge of selected disease states and to evaluate the intent of health fair participants with abnormal screening results to seek follow-up care within 1 month of screening. METHODS Health fair participants were assessed for changes in their knowledge of specific diseases before and after screenings. Participants'...

This paper investigates the relationship between institutional trust in the health-care system, i.e. an institutional aspect of social capital, and self-rated health, and whether the strength of this association is affected by access to health-care services. The 2004 public health survey in the Scania region of Sweden is a cross-sectional study; a total of 27,963 respondents aged 18-80 years an...

OBJECTIVE To provide an accurate representation of the economic burden of arthritis by estimating the adjusted incremental healthcare cost of arthritis at multiple percentiles and reporting the cost trends across time. METHODS A healthcare cost study based on health survey and linked administrative data, where costs were estimated from the government's perspective in dollars per person per ye...