Background Limited efforts have been observed in low and middle income countries to undertake health system performance assessment at district level. Absence of a comprehensive data collection tool and lack of a standardised single summary measure defining overall performance are some of the main problems. Present study has been undertaken to develop a summary composite health system performanc...

background an effective emergency referral transport system is the link between the home of the pregnant woman and a health facility providing basic or comprehensive emergency obstetric care. this study attempts to explore the role of emergency transport associated with maternal deaths in unnao district, uttar pradesh (up).   methods a descriptive study was carried out to assess the causes of a...

The present article is aimed at significance of statistics in growing health science industries. Health and statistics are essential tools in demography; health care, medical profession and community services. Statistics plays very significant role to describe what is normal and healthy in population and to find limits of normality in variables, such as weight and pulse rate, sex and haemoglobi...

BACKGROUND There is increasing focus on the strength of primary health care systems in low and middle-income countries (LMIC). There are important roles for higher quality district hospital care within these systems. These hospitals are also sources of information of considerable importance to health systems, but this role, as with the wider roles of district hospitals, has been neglected. KE...

INTRODUCTION A patient's needs and the seriousness of the disease are not the only factors that determine referral to hospital. The objective of this study was to analyse whether locum doctors (LDs) have a different pattern of referral to hospital from regular GPs (RGPs). METHODS All hospital referrals for one year (n = 5566 patients) from two Norwegian rural primary health care (PHC) centres...

BACKGROUND Nepal is an underdeveloped country in which half of the total health expenditure is from out-of-pocket payments. Thus, the Government of Nepal introduced universal free health-care services up to the level of district hospitals, and targeted these services to poor and marginalized people in regional and subregional hospitals. The aim of this descriptive study was to explore the imple...

Opinions conflict on whether there is a place in the Health Service for general practitioner (community) hospitals in which the patients' treatment is mainly the responsibility of their family doctors. The authors therefore analysed a sample of the patients admitted in the course of a year to a group of two general district hospitals with a comparable sample of the patients admitted to a genera...

BACKGROUND Promoting national health research agendas in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) requires adequate numbers of individuals with skills to initiate and conduct research. Recently, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have joined research capacity building efforts to increase research leadership by LMIC nationals. Partners In Health, an international NGO operating in Rwanda, impl...

Impressive progress has been made in global surgery in the past 10 years, and now serious and evidence-based national strategies are being developed for scaling-up surgical services in sub-Saharan Africa. Key to achieving this goal requires developing a realistic country-based estimate of burden of surgical disease, developing an accurate estimate of existing need, deve...

BACKGROUND Two-thirds of complaints received by the Hong Kong Environmental Protection Department in 1988 were related to poor air quality. In July 1990 legislation was implemented to reduce fuel sulphur levels. The intervention led to a reduction in respiratory symptoms and bronchial hyperresponsiveness of primary school children. The objectives of this study were to investigate the difference...