INTRODUCTION Kenya records a high maternal mortality ratio 362 maternal deaths per 100 000 live births. Tharaka Sub County has poor transport infrastructure, low levels of socio-economic status and long distances to health facilities. Secondary to these factors, delivering in a health facility is a challenge. Delivering in a health facility is one of the strategies to avert maternal death throu...

OBJECTIVES Epidemiology is often described as 'the science of public health'. Here we aim to assess the extent that epidemiological methods, as covered in contemporary standard textbooks, provide tools that can assess the relative magnitude of public health problems and can be used to help rank and assess public health priorities. STUDY DESIGN Narrative literature review. METHODS Thirty tex...

BACKGROUND The advent of eHealth interventions to address psychological concerns and health behaviors has created new opportunities, including the ability to optimize the effectiveness of intervention activities and then deliver these activities consistently to a large number of individuals in need. Given that eHealth interventions grounded in a well-delineated theoretical model for change are ...

A continuous explicit Runge-Kutta (CERK) method provides a continuous approximation to an initial value problem. Such a method may be obtained by appending additional stages to a discrete method, or alternatively by solving the appropriate order conditions directly. Owren and Zennaro have shown for order 5 that the latter approach yields some CERK methods that require fewer derivative evaluatio...

The long history of persuasion research shows how to change explicit, self-reported evaluations through direct appeals. At the same time, research on how to change implicit evaluations has focused almost entirely on techniques of retraining existing evaluations or manipulating contexts. In five studies, we examined whether direct appeals can change implicit evaluations in the same way as they d...

Certain pairs of Runge-Kutta methods may be used additively to solve a system of n differential equations x' = J(t)x + g(t, x). Pairs of methods, of order p < 4, where one method is semiexplicit and /(-stable and the other method is explicit, are obtained. These methods require the LU factorization of one n X n matrix, and p evaluations of g, in each step. It is shown that such methods have a s...

Intensive efforts are underway across the world to improve the quality of health care. It is important to use evaluation methods to identify improvement efforts that work well before they are replicated across a broad range of contexts. Evaluation methods need to provide an understanding of why an improvement initiative has or has not worked and how it can be improved in the future. However, im...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to investigate the parameters of ante-mortem delirium of the patients in a closed psychiatric institution and to compare them with the ante-mortem psychopathology of the medical patients. METHODS There were 139 medical records of the patients analyzed, who died during the period of 1997-2003 at the in-patient psychiatric institution. The diagnoses were rec...