BACKGROUND For patients in all health-care settings HIV screening is recommended after the patient is notified that testing will be performed unless the patient declines. The nation's physicians and other health care providers should assume a much more active role in promoting HIV testing. The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which missed opportunities for earlier HIV testing ...

BACKGROUND An East African survey showed that among the few health facilities that measured adherence to antiretroviral therapy, practices and definitions varied widely. We evaluated the feasibility of collecting routine data to standardize adherence measurement using a draft set of indicators. METHODS Targeting 20 facilities each in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda, in each facility we in...

BACKGROUND Pandemic influenza poses a serious threat to populations in low and lower-middle income countries that face delays in access to health care and inadequately equipped facilities. Oxygen is first-line therapy for influenza-related hypoxia and a standard component of emergency respiratory resuscitation, yet remains a scarce resource in many countries. METHODOLOGY A snapshot survey of ...

BACKGROUND National legislation in Pakistan regulating blood banks has been introduced several times, but has never been passed. To support provincial-level efforts to develop legislation we conducted a study to evaluate blood-banking practices in Karachi, Pakistan, to identify areas that could be improved. METHODS Thirty-seven blood banks were randomly selected from a list of 87 Karachi bloo...

BACKGROUND Ghana is one of the sub-Saharan African countries making significant progress towards universal access to quality healthcare. However, it remains a challenge to attain the 2015 targets for the health related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) partly due to health sector human resource challenges including low staff motivation. PURPOSE This paper addresses indicators of health work...

We consider a class of location-allocation problems with immobile servers, stochastic demand and congestion that arises in several planning contexts: location of emergency medical clinics; preventive healthcare centers; refuse collection and disposal centers; stores and service centers; bank branches and automated banking machines; internet mirror sites; web service providers (servers); and dis...

Sustainability is a monumental issue that should be considered in designing a logistics system. In order to incorporate sustainability concepts in our study, a waste collection problem with economic, environmental, and social objective functions was addressed. The first objective function minimized overall costs of the system, including establishment of depots and treatment facilities. Addressi...

In the recent decade, special attention is paid to reverse logistic due to economic benefits of recovery and recycling of used products as well as environmental legislation and social concerns. On the other hand، many researches claim that separately and sequential planning of forward and reverse logistic causes sub-optimality. Effective transport activities are also one of the most important c...