INTRODUCTION Efforts are needed to improve palliative care in rural communities, given the unique characteristics and inherent challenges with respect to working within the physical aspects of residential settings. Nurses who work in rural communities play a key role in the delivery of palliative care services. Hence, the purpose of this study was to explore nurses' experiences of providing pal...

The paper discusses the institutional reforms for rural electrification (RE) in Thailand and Bangladesh and analyses the impacts of private sector participation in electricity generation and tariff reforms on the poor in Thailand. RE program in Thailand, initiated in 1977, increased electricity access by rural households from 7% in early 70s to 97% by 2000. In Bangladesh the RE program, initiat...

Socioeconomic trends and developments within the U.S. healthcare system have challenged rural hospitals' ability to maintain adequate operating margins and offer needed services. However, some hospitals have fared better in this negative environment than have others. To clarify factors that distinguish the most viable rural Catholic hospitals from the least viable, our study identified a group ...

The New South Wales Department of Health (NSW Health) wishes to make appropriate use of casemix data as inputs to the determination of funding levels for small rural hospitals. However, other factors such as hospital size and degree of isolation might need to be taken into account. The study reported here involved correlation of actual expenditures with those predicted by use of a casemix model...

BACKGROUND Physical fitness has been proposed as a marker for health during adolescence. Currently, little is known about physical fitness and its association with blood lipid profile in adolescents from low and middle-income countries. The aim of this study is therefore to assess physical fitness among urban and rural adolescents and its associations with blood lipid profile in a middle-income...

Both physical activity and exposure to nature are known separately to have positive effects on physical and mental health. We have investigated whether there is a synergistic benefit in adopting physical activities whilst being directly exposed to nature ('green exercise'). Five groups of 20 subjects were exposed to a sequence of 30 scenes projected on a wall whilst exercising on a treadmill. F...

BACKGROUND Feasible and cost-effective as well as population specific instruments for monitoring physical activity (PA) levels are needed for the management and prevention of non-communicable diseases. The WHO-endorsed Global Physical Activity Questionnaire (GPAQ) has been widely used in developing countries, but the evidence base for its validity, particularly for rural populations, is still l...