INTRODUCTION A patient's needs and the seriousness of the disease are not the only factors that determine referral to hospital. The objective of this study was to analyse whether locum doctors (LDs) have a different pattern of referral to hospital from regular GPs (RGPs). METHODS All hospital referrals for one year (n = 5566 patients) from two Norwegian rural primary health care (PHC) centres...

BACKGROUND Rates of retention in care of HIV-positive pregnant women in care programs in Nigeria remain generally poor with rates around 40% reported for specific programs. Poor quality of services in health facilities and long waiting times are among the critical factors militating against retention of these women in care. The aim of the interventions in this study is to assess whether a conti...

BACKGROUND Nepal is an underdeveloped country in which half of the total health expenditure is from out-of-pocket payments. Thus, the Government of Nepal introduced universal free health-care services up to the level of district hospitals, and targeted these services to poor and marginalized people in regional and subregional hospitals. The aim of this descriptive study was to explore the imple...

Respiratory diseases are the commonest cause ofhospital attendance and also death in many parts of the Third World. They resulted in 22% of adult admissions to one hospital in Uganda,' 23-5% of paediatric admissions in Zambia,2 and up to 25% of all hospital cases in Papua New Guinea.3 Respiratory infections, particularly pneumonia and tuberculosis, are the most common conditions, but asthma and...

BACKGROUND The Yashoda program, named after a legendary foster-mother in Indian mythology, under the Norway-India Partnership Initiative was launched as a pilot program in 2008 to improve the quality of maternal and neonatal care at facilities in select districts of India. Yashodas were placed mainly at district hospitals, which are high delivery load facilities, to provide support and care to ...

OBJECTIVES To explore linkage to and retention in HIV care after an episode of cryptococcal meningitis (CM) in rural South Africa. Design. A retrospective case series of adult individuals (> or = 16 years old) with laboratory-confirmed CM from January - December 2007 at Hlabisa Hospital--a district hospital in northern KwaZulu-Natal. OUTCOME MEASURES Inpatient mortality and associated risk fa...

BACKGROUND Promoting national health research agendas in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) requires adequate numbers of individuals with skills to initiate and conduct research. Recently, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have joined research capacity building efforts to increase research leadership by LMIC nationals. Partners In Health, an international NGO operating in Rwanda, impl...

The Medical University of Southern Africa (Medunsa), as it was formerly known, came into being in 1978 following an Act of Parliament that motivated for the establishment of a medical university to rectify the dire underrepresentation of the black community in the South African health system. The main aim was therefore to train black doctors, dentists, veterinarians and allied health profession...

At a District General Hospital the organization of a clinic for the investigation and treatment of patients with calculus disease of the urinary tract is described. The way in which such a clinic may be orgainzed is discussed and the results presented. In patients with idiopathic hypercalciuria, sodium cellulose phosphate causes a significant reduction in urinary calcium levels when used in suc...

International Journal of Medical Science and Public Health Online 2015. © 2015 Shubhanshu Gupta. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the mat...