Health care workers at every level, qualified and unqualified, appear to have a higher than average sickness and absence rate than workers in other sectors, and it has been identified that stress may play a leading role in nurses leaving the profession. There are further strong indicators that sickness and absence is higher amongst mental health workers. Numerous small scale studies (Mazure 199...

Health as a basic right of the people and essential demand should be considered as a joint responsibility of the government and people of a community. As much as the people of a community aware and involved in the individual health promotion and problem solving of their community in all dimensions, the probability of reaching to favorable health measurements is also increased. Community assess...

Editorials 590 The last decade has highlighted major gaps in the availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality of the health workforce in many countries. 1 The quantity, skills and geographic distribution of the health workforce have long been recognized as factors that limit population health outcomes and progress towards the related Millennium Development Goals. 2 Similarly, the even...

BACKGROUND Surveillance systems are increasingly relying upon community-based or crowd-sourced data to complement traditional facilities-based data sources. Data collected by community health workers during the routine course of care could combine the early warning power of community-based data collection with the predictability and diagnostic regularity of facility data. These data could infor...

OBJECTIVE To describe Ebola cases in the district Ebola management centre of in Kailahun, a remote rural district of Sierra Leone, in terms of geographic origin, patient and hospitalisation characteristics, treatment outcomes and time from symptom onset to admission. METHODS Data of all Ebola cases from June 23rd to October 5th 2014 were reviewed. Ebola was confirmed by reverse-transcriptase-...

BACKGROUND Capacity building has developed as a health promotion approach that enables people to address determinants of health and to improve health outcomes. Although capacity building has been much discussed, little is known about what it means to build capacity in northern communities. This study explores the meaning and experience of capacity building in the Yukon. METHODS A qualitative ...

Background National community health worker (CHW) programmes are increasingly regarded as an integral component of primary healthcare (PHC) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). At the interface of the formal health system and communities, CHW programmes evolve in context specific ways, with unique cadres and a variety of vertical and horizontal relationships. These programmes need...

Background Countries with health workforce shortages are increasingly turning to multipurpose community health workers (CHWs) to extend integrated services to the community-level. However, there may be tradeoffs with the number of tasks a CHW can effectively perform before quality and/or productivity decline. This qualitative study was conducted within an existing program in Iringa, Tanza...

OBJECTIVES This paper examines unmet health care needs in one of Canada's most hard-to-reach populations, adult sex workers, and investigates whether their reasons for not accessing health care are different from those of other Canadians. METHODS Data gathered in 2012-2013 from sex workers aged 19 and over (n = 209) in five Canadian census metropolitan areas (CMAs) were analyzed to estimate t...