Turning liabilities into resources: informal village doctors and tuberculosis control in Bangladesh

Turning liabilities into resources: informal village doctors and tuberculosis control in Bangladesh.

In 1998, the Damien Foundation Bangladesh invited semi-qualified, private "gram dakter" (Bangla for "village doctors") to participate in tuberculosis (TB) programmes in a population of 26 million people in rural Bangladesh. The organization trained 12 525 village doctors to not only refer suspected TB cases for free diagnosis but also to provide directly observed treatment (DOT) free of charge....

Turning doctors into leaders.

Are 'Village Doctors' in Bangladesh a curse or a blessing?

BACKGROUND Bangladesh is one of the health workforce crisis countries in the world. In the face of an acute shortage of trained professionals, ensuring healthcare for a population of 150 million remains a major challenge for the nation. To understand the issues related to shortage of health workforce and healthcare provision, this paper investigates the role of various healthcare providers in p...

The role of village doctors on tuberculosis control and the DOTS strategy in Shandong Province, China.

This study aims to assess the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of village doctors based on current national policies and to explore factors determining their roles in the directly observed therapy, short course (DOTS) strategy and tuberculosis (TB) control in rural China. In this cross-sectional study conducted in Shandong Province, we interviewed a total of 1,824 village doctors from 36 vil...

Does microfinance change informal lending in village economies? Evidence from Bangladesh ¬リニ

This paper examines how availability of microfinance influences households’ borrowing from informal sources in village economies. It uses a unique household level panel data set, which spans more than two decades (1987–2008), from rural Bangladesh. We find that households’ access to microfinance reduces the incidence of borrowing from informal sources, but not the amount of borrowing. We find t...