BACKGROUND The number of home-visit nursing agencies in Japan has greatly increased over the past 20 years since the Japanese government first introduced it in 1992 to meet the increased needs of home-bound elderly. Since then, home-visit nursing has come to serve for a variety of populations such as those with terminal-stage cancer, neurological diseases, psychiatric conditions, or children wi...

Despite recent improvements in child survival in sub-Saharan Africa, neonatal mortality rates remain largely unchanged. This study aimed to determine the frequency of delivery and newborn-care practices in southern Tanzania, where neonatal mortality is higher than the national average. All households in five districts of Southern Tanzania were approached to participate. Of 213,220 female reside...

A retrospective cross-sectional survey was conducted to assess key practices and costs relating to home- and institutional delivery care in rural Rajasthan, India. One block from each of two sample districts was covered (estimated population--279,132). Field investigators listed women who had delivered in the past three months and contacted them for structured case interview. In total, 1947 (96...

There is a known high disparity in access to perinatal care services between urban and rural areas in Tanzania. This study analysed repeated cross-sectional (RCS) data from Tanzania to explore the relationship between antenatal care (ANC) visits, facility-based delivery and the reasons for home births in women who had made ANC visits. We used data from RCS Demographic and Health Surveys spannin...

The efficacy of long-term oxygen therapy for hypoxemic COPD patients is well established. However, oxygen is expensive and the portability of home oxygen is limited by the weight and bulk of the oxygen source. As a result, there has been a recent surge of interest in creating oxygen-conserving devices and methods. The efficiency of oxygen therapy can be improved over steady flow delivery by foc...

OBJECTIVE To determine home based newborn care practices in rural Nepal in order to inform strategies to improve neonatal outcome. DESIGN Cross sectional, retrospective study using structured interviews. SETTING Makwanpur district, Nepal. PARTICIPANTS 5411 married women aged 15 to 49 years who had given birth to a live baby in the past year. MAIN OUTCOMES MEASURES Attendance at delivery...

To determine whether there is a difference on the historical and clinical characteristics of omphalitis among term and preterm appropriate for gestational age (AGA) and small for gestational age (SGA) infants, we prospectively investigated 85 newborns with bacteriologically proved omphalitis. Study groups were based on gestational age and being SGA. Preterm AGA infants had significantly lower m...

The case for promoting maternal choice with regards to location of delivery is clear. The current default position is to give birth in hospital in a consultant-led unit. Yet, despite the ability to choose location, only 5% of women give birth in a midwife-led unit, and 3% at home. For most low risk mothers, perinatal outcomes are generally the same regardless of location, with the exception of ...

This paper considers the three-dimensional container packing problem (3DCPP) under home delivery service, which predetermines an ordering of delivering ordered cargo boxes to customers, and aims to load a subset of those boxes according to the delivery ordering into a 3D car container with maximal utilization ratio of the container space while prohibiting the process of delivering cargos to eac...