BACKGROUND This paper explores how community participation can be used in designing rural primary healthcare services by describing a study of Scottish communities. Community participation is extolled in healthcare policy as useful in planning services and is understood as particularly relevant in rural settings, partly due to high social capital. Literature describes many community participati...

OBJECTIVE To compare sociodemographic and motivational factors for healthcare use and identify desirable health-promoting resources among groups in a low socioeconomic status (SES) community in Chicago, IL. BACKGROUND Disparities in health services and outcomes are well established in low SES urban neighborhoods in the United States and many factors beyond service availability and quality imp...

Although experimental trials often identify optimal strategies for improving community health, transferring operational innovation from well-funded research programs to resource-constrained settings often languishes. Because research initiatives are based in institutions equipped with unique resources and staff capabilities, results are often dismissed by decisionmakers as irrelevant to large-s...

In the past, immunization programmes have focused primarily on rural areas. However, with the recognition of the increasing numbers of urban poor, it is timely to review urban immunization activities. This update addresses two questions: Is there any need to be concerned about urban immunization and, if so, is more of the same kind of rural EPI activity needed or are there specific urban issues...

Health systems reform processes have increasingly recognized the essential contribution of communities to the success of health programs and development activities in general. Here we examine the experience from Kilifi district in Kenya of implementing annual health sector planning guidelines that included community participation in problem identification, priority setting, and planning. We des...

each community , due to differences in climatical , social economical and cultural peculiarities has a different sort of public health problems . in planning and executing public health programs , health workers should first be concerned with the problems of the locality and then with the program.