This report describes the organisation of the Belgian long-term care system. It can be characterised as a mixed system, with extensive public care provision and the substantial support of informal care provided mainly within the family. While the current volume and quality of services appears to be adequate, the future increase in the number of dependent elderly persons over the next two decade...

BACKGROUND Previous research showed that deprived individuals are less likely to attend breast screening and those providing intense amounts of informal care tend to be more deprived than non-caregivers. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between informal caregiving and uptake of breast screening and to determine if socio-economic gradients in screening attendance were explai...

Background: Informal payments in the health sector of many developing countries are considered as a major impediment to health care reforms. Informal payments are a form of systemic fraud and have adverse effects on the performance of the health system. In this study, the frequency and extent of informal payments as well as the determinants of these payments were investigated in general hospita...

background: in-depth knowledge of antibiotic principles is widely considered a necessary condition for appropriate prescribing of antibiotics. the study aimed at determining the impact of healthcare providers’ level of knowledge in bacteriology and principles of antibiotic prescribing on their abilities to prescribe antibiotics appropriately. methods: a structured questionnaire survey targeting...

background & aim: sexual health education is one of the responsibilities of healthcare workers at schools, which can reduce the risk of sexually transmitted diseases such as aids, unwanted pregnancy, abortion, substance abuse, sexual violence, and suicidal tendencies. this study aimed to investigate healthcare workers’ competence in sexual health education for female adolescents at schools. met...

BACKGROUND The private health sector is a primary source of curative care for childhood illnesses in many low- and middle-income countries. Therefore ensuring appropriate private sector care is an important step towards improving outcomes from illnesses like pneumonia, which is the leading infectious cause of childhood mortality worldwide. This study aimed to provide evidence on private sector ...

Nottinghamshire family health services authority serves a population of around a million people and so far eight of the 52 eligible practices have become budget holders. A further eight practices have joined the scheme this April, bringing the percentage of people in budget holding practices to 17% of the Nottinghamshire population. The Calverton practice was one of the first budget holding pra...

Informal patient payments are a key characteristic of nearly all Central and Eastern European health care systems (1–3). Apart from formal patient payments, which are regulated by national legislation (4) and quasi-formal charges, which are set by the health care provider in the absence of clear government regulations (5–7), there are also informal payments (also known as “under-the-table” or “...

Data from a comparative study of 1975 African American, Puerto Rican, and non-Hispanic White persons age 60 and older in a large Northeastern city were used to investigate the relative contribution of ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) to explaining differences in the need for and receipt of informal care. It was hypothesized that differences in disability would be related largely to SES,...

BACKGROUND Informal care is often not included in economic evaluations in healthcare, while the impact of caregiving can be relevant for cost-effectiveness recommendations from a societal perspective. The impact of informal care can be measured and valued with the CarerQol instrument, which measures the impact of informal care on seven important burden dimensions (CarerQol-7D) and values this i...