BACKGROUND Health system weaknesses in Africa are broadly well known, constraining progress on reducing the burden of both communicable and non-communicable disease (Afr Health Monitor, Special issue, 2011, 14-24), and the key challenges in leadership, governance, health workforce, medical products, vaccines and technologies, information, finance and service delivery have been well described (I...

Background Avante Zambéziais an initiative of a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), Friends in Global Health, LLC (FGH) and the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health (VIGH) to provide technical assistance to the Mozambican Ministry of Health (MoH) in rural Zambézia Province. Avante Zambézia developed a district level Health Management Mentorship (HMM) program to strengthen health systems in t...

BACKGROUND Like other African countries, Tanzania has in recent years, been implementing various exemptions and targeting programmes to protect and ensure equitable access to health care by poorer segments of the population. A body of evidence indicates that exemption policies, while potentially effective in principle, are ineffective in implementation. However, there is evidence that some dist...

OBJECTIVES A key policy question for the government of Uganda is how to equitably allocate primary health care pharmaceutical budgets to districts. This paper seeks to identify variables influencing current primary health care pharmaceutical expenditure and their usefulness in allocating prospective pharmaceutical budgets to districts. METHODS This was a cross sectional, retrospective observa...

background: geographical information system is a new tool in environmental epidemiology that makes the opportunity of visualization and analysis of spatial data. the aim of this study was to determine the geographic variation of low birth weight using geographic information system in order to evaluate the efficacy of primary health care and health information system.   methods: low birth weight...

AIM Poverty and social exclusion is measured through different criteria and one of them is the health sector. The relationship between Roma population and the health sector is on the edge of researchers' interest in the Slovak Republic. The purpose of this paper is a quantification of the regional disparities in the development of mortality which is causally linked with selected infrastructural...

An assessment was done in Tanzania to determine the extent to which the primary health care services have contributed to reducing the burden of malaria since the system was initiated in the 1980s. Seven descriptive processes and outcome indicators of effectiveness were used: changes of malaria transmission and incidence over time; use of facility-based care services for malaria; patients' acces...

Background: The impact of reorganisation on health services delivery is a recurring issue in every healthcare system. In 2005 Vietnam reorganised the delivery of health services at the district level by splitting preventive, curative, and administrative roles. This qualitative study explored how these reforms impacted on the organisation of maternal health service delivery at district and commu...

To improve the quality of health care in Nepal, supervision/ monitoring involving periodic visits by the district supervisor to health facilities (top-down approach) is in practice. It is not objectively implemented because of time and financial constraints and terrain of the country. To assess the effectiveness of a pre-tested strategy i.e. peer-group discussion with self-assessment piloted th...