The time is right to shift the focus of the global maternal health community to the challenges of effective implementation of services within districts. 20 years after the launch of the Safe Motherhood Initiative, the community has reached a broad consensus about priority interventions, incorporated these interventions into national policy documents, and organised globally in coalition with the...

OBJECTIVE It is widely believed that only a minority of vulnerable children and adolescents receive any mental health services. Although health care disparities associated with sociodemographic characteristics are well known, almost no information exists about another potentially important source of disparity for children: How does state of residence affect mental health service use? METHODS ...

Although high-income countries share and value the goal of protecting children from harm, national data on child maltreatment and the involvement of social services, the judiciary and health services remain relatively scarce. To explore potential reasons for this, a number of high-income countries across the world (Belgium, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Switzerland...

BACKGROUND Community health workers (CHWs) are a component of the health system in many countries, providing effective community-based services to mothers and infants. However, implementation of CHW programmes at scale has been challenging in many settings. AIM To explore the acceptability of CHWs conducting household visits to mothers and infants during pregnancy and after delivery, from the...

Aboriginal Australian children experience profound oral health disparities relative to their non-Aboriginal counterparts. In response to community concerns regarding Aboriginal child oral health in the regional town of Port Augusta, South Australia, a child dental health service was established within a Community Controlled Aboriginal Health Service. A partnership approach was employed with the...

OBJECTIVES The personal child health record (PCHR) is a record of a child's growth, development, and uptake of preventive health services, designed to enhance communication between parents and health professionals. We examined its use throughout the United Kingdom with respect to recording children's weight and measures of social disadvantage and infant health. DESIGN Cross sectional survey w...

During the 1980s, an ambitious project for health development restructured medical services throughout rural Haiti. The "Rural Health Delivery System" (RHDS) pursued several goals of primary health care, including dispensary-based maternal and child health services and the provision of low-cost drugs. Based on fieldwork in a single village, this article examines how local residents pushed the p...

This paper assesses the role of social affiliation, measured by caste, in shaping investments in child health. The special setting that we have chosen for the analysis - tea estates in the South Indian High Range - allows us to control nonparametrically for differences in income, access to health services, and patterns of morbidity across low caste and high caste households. In this controlled ...

The lack of culturally appropriate health and mental health care has contributed to the large number of African American youth and families involved in the child welfare system. This article reviews the consequences of the insufficient access to culturally sensitive, evidence-supported interventions for African American foster youth. The authors describe a framework for the development of cultu...

BACKGROUND Tanzania is on track to meet Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4 for child survival, but is making insufficient progress for newborn survival and maternal health (MDG 5) and family planning. To understand this mixed progress and to identify priorities for the post-2015 era, Tanzania was selected as a Countdown to 2015 case study. METHODS We analysed progress made in Tanzania betwee...