conclusions while rural living has a protective effect on nafld, marriage may be a potential risk factor for this condition. results we found that nafld had an inverse association with rural living in men (or = 0.513, 0.422 - 0.622, p value < 0.001) and women (or = 0.431, 0.345 - 0.539, p value < 0.001). furthermore, we determined that nafld had a direct association with marriage status for men...

Floristic studies are fundamental for the applied sciences such as rangelandmanagement and conservation. Unique ecological and climatic conditions in the NorthernKhorasan Province (NKP) make it a remarkable habitat for the floristic studies. Plant specieswere collected from 50 field sites, representing major habitats of winter and rural rangelands.Surveys were conducted during active growth per...

The reluctance of physicians to stay in remote and rural hospitals has resulted in a shortage of doctors in these settings, and therefore a decline in the quality of care and an intolerable overload on functioning doctors. However, mature paramedics find it difficult to comply with the demands of ambulance work and look for easier tasks that suit their age. The two problems may have a common so...

Critical illness intersects with the workload of rural doctors in Australia, mostly via their on-call responsibilities to rural hospitals. A significant proportion of these are prehospital incidents - vehicle crashes, farming injuries, bushfire etc. Effective care for such patients requires an integration of prehospital ambulance services, retrieval services and tertiary level trauma services a...

In resource-poor countries, substantial sums of money from governments and international donors are used to purchase equipment for health facilities. WHO estimates that 50-80% of such equipment remains non-functional. This article is based on experience from various projects in developing countries in Asia and Africa. The key issues in the purchase, distribution, installation, management and ma...

We find that the presence of village Internet facilities, offering government to citizen services, is positively associated with the rate at which the villagers obtain some of these services. In a study of a rural Internet project in India, we identify a positive correlation for two such Internet services: obtaining birth certificates for children and applications for old age pensions. Both the...

Beginning with a brief overview of national health care quality improvement efforts, this article describes national initiatives to improve the quality of care and patient safety, along with the challenges of measuring quality of care in rural settings. Next, the article analyzes the performance of rural Minnesota hospitals in the Hospital Compare and Leapfrog initiatives and compares the resul...

Rural hospitals continue to face the threat of closure. Congress passed legislation in 1989 and 1990 to offer an alternative for small rural hospitals; the legislation encourages hospitals to form networks comprising an essential access community hospital (EACH) and one or more rural primary care hospitals. This legislation is a tightly focused program that will affect no more than an estimated...

The results are reported of a study of casualty and surgical services in five general practitioner hospitals in Perthshire - Aberfeldy, Auchterarder, Blairgowrie, Crieff and Pitlochry. Details of the total workload, the nature of the conditions treated and the referral rate to major hospitals are given. Figures for the Royal Infirmary, Perth, the main referral hospital for the county, are also ...

INTRODUCTION Little evidence exists about the impact of strategies to increase rural retention in developing countries. To address Thailand's long-lasting critical shortage of doctors, two new government-funded projects to increase the production of rural doctors have been employed through collaboration between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Public Health (MOPH). The present stud...