Background and Objectives: Informal payment in the health settings is a significant challenge facing the health system, with consequences such as inequity in access to healthcare services, distrust to health care system, and dissatisfied customers. Detailed identification of the nature of the problem is perquisite to developing relevant overcoming strategies. Given that, this study aimed at pro...

Purpose: To report on stroke patients and their informal caregivers’ perceptions and experiences regarding feasibility and acceptability of home-care based rehabilitation, in the context of the implementation of an EHSD procedure. Theory: EHSD procedures are considered promising alternatives to conventional care in stroke rehabilitation, as they seem to be able to reduce costs with illness and ...

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 Primary informal caregivers provide a substantial amount of the care and support for persons with Alzheimer's disease (AD). This review aims to investigate the association between the quality of life (QoL) of primary informal AD caregivers and the level of care that these caregivers provide to persons with AD. METHODS Studies involving primary informal caregivers of persons with AD...

This paper reports on a distance education project where a threaded discussion board was used for interaction amongst students and teachers. The experiences from the first year of the project shows that such a forum can be an important complement to other evaluative resources in order to monitor student's expectations and experiences. Furthermore, it is argued that discursive evaluations can se...

BACKGROUND In most societies the health marketplace is pluralistic in character, with a mix of formal and informal providers. In high-income countries, state regulation of the market helps ensure quality and access and mitigate market failures. In the present study, using Haiti as a case study, we explore what happens to the functioning of the pluralistic health marketplace in severely disrupte...

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...