BACKGROUND Co-occurring substance use increases the risk of hospitalisation in people with severe mental illness, whereas Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) generally reduces hospitalisation in patients with severe mental illness and high inpatient service use. Because the superiority of ACT over standard services amongst patients with problematic substance use is uncertain, the present study ...

PURPOSE The Ethiopian Paediatric HIV Cohort (EPHIC) was established to identify clinical and laboratory predictors of virological treatment failure to ultimately develop a clinical-immunological prediction rule with area under the curve of >0.80 for detecting first-line antiretroviral therapy failure (ARTF). It will also assess the performance of the current WHO guidelines for detection of firs...

BACKGROUND Suicidal ideation may lead to deliberate self-harm which increases the risk of death by suicide. Globally, the main cause of deliberate self-harm is depression. The aim of this study was to explore prevalence of, and risk factors for, suicidal ideation among men and women with common mental disorder (CMD) symptoms attending public clinics in Zimbabwe, and to determine whether problem...

BACKGROUND The successful implementation of maternal vaccination relies on results of clinical trials, considering the prenatal and postnatal attendance at selected healthcare institutions. This study evaluated factors influencing maternal/infant access to healthcare facilities to identify potential barriers to participation in future clinical trials on maternal vaccination. METHODS In this p...

BACKGROUND In the last decade, almost every low- or middle-income country in the world has expressed support for universal health coverage (UHC). While at the beginning of the UHC movement, country strategies focused on increasing access to the formal sector as the first step of UHC, there is now consensus that countries should cover the entire population, with particular attention to covering ...

This paper explores the socio-demographic variables (age, gender, ethnicity, education, work status, and disability) and study environment (course programme and course block), that may influence persistence or dropout of students at the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand. We examine to what extent these factors, i.e. enrolment data help us in pre-identifying successful and unsuccessful students. T...

A conventional speaker verification (SV) system needs an enrollment session to collect the training data. In [I], we introduced a speaker authentication method called verbal information ven$cation (VIV) which verifies a speaker by verbal contents instead of speech characteristics. Such a system does not need an enrollment session. In this paper, VIV is combined with SV. We propose a system whic...