Staff at 11 rural hospitals in an under-resourced region of Eastern Cape Province, South Africa, participated in an intervention to improve the quality of care of severely malnourished children through training and support aimed at implementing the WHO case-management guidelines. Despite similar intervention inputs, some hospitals reduced their case-fatality rates by at least half, whereas othe...

Maria Laura Alzua, CEDLAS, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina (Principal Investigator) Amy Janel Pickering, Stanford University, USA Habiba Djebbari, Aix-Marseille University, France Carolina Lopez, CEDLAS, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina Juan Camilo Cardenas, University of the Andes, Colombia Maria Adelaida Lopera, Université Laval, Canada Nicolas Osbert, UNICEF Massa Coul...

In this policy brief, we estimate and document the national magnitude of charges associated with hospitalizations due to ambulatory care sensitive conditions (ACSCs) in rural hospitals. The brief also reports this type of charge by hospital size. This research will inform policy makers about the magnitude of rural preventable hospitalizations and the associated potential savings in hospital res...

The Remote Console (ReCon) telerehabilitation system provides a platform for therapists to guide rehabilitation sessions from a remote location. The ReCon system integrates real-time graphics, audio/video communication, private therapist chat, post-test data graphs, extendable patient and exercise performance monitoring, exercise pre-configuration and modification under a single application. Th...

IN 1979 THE administration of Tucson Medical Center (TMC) encouraged the library staff to explore the possibility of assisting rural Arizona hospitals in developing medical library services. One of the greatest obstacles encountered in establishing effective rural hospital libraries was the absence of trained reference personnel to provide on-site service. Another considerable problem was the d...

When Congress created the Medicare Prospective Payment System (PPS) for hospitals in 1983, it established separate standardized payment amounts (national average costs per Medicare case) for inpatient services provided by urban and rural hospitals. The urban standardized amount was 25.3 percent greater than the rural standardized amount. This variation in payment was challenged by rural health ...

Many government policies either target the underlying supply infrastructure or have indirect effects on market structure. In this paper we seek to understand the impact of the Critical Access Hospital (CAH) program on the U.S. rural hospital infrastructure and societal welfare. This program provides generous reimbursement to hospitals in exchange for size and service limitations. We specify and...

OBJECTIVES The occurrence of intra and post operative complications was compared in different groups of leprosy patients. The association between post operative and intra operative complications was studied, and how visual outcomes were affected by these complications. We also share our medical management and surgical techniques that might help minimise intra operative complications and improve...

Approximately 20,000 stool specimens from patients with diarrhea visiting 1 urban and 1 rural hospital in Bangladesh during January 2001-May 2006 were tested for group A rotavirus antigen, and 4,712 (24.0%) were positive. G and P genotyping was performed on a subset of 10% of the positive samples (n = 471). During the 2001-2005 rotavirus seasons, G1P[8] (36.4%) and G9P[8] (27.7%) were the domin...

INTRODUCTION Chest pain is common in emergency department (ED) patients and represents a considerable burden for rural health services. Health services reforms to improve access to care need appropriately skilled and supported clinicians in the delivery of safe and effective care, including the use of emergency nurse practitioners (ENPs). Despite increasing use of ENPs, little is known about th...