Child Protective Services Agencies (CPSAs) share many characteristics with other organizations operating in high-risk, high-profile industries. Over the past 50 years, industries as diverse as aviation, nuclear power, and healthcare have applied principles from safety science to improve practice. The current paper describes the rationale, characteristics, and challenges of applying concepts fro...

Iodine deficiency is a factor that may compromise child development, but is not the only one. Other health determinants, some of them outside the healthcare system, are able to influence development. Fighting iodine deficiency may be a pragmatic and useful strategy if it is found to be not maleficent, beneficial to health, and cost-effective, and does not make us lose the notion that child deve...

OBJECTIVE To describe a novel approach to hospital mortality meetings to elucidate understanding of contributory factors to child death and inform practice in the National Health Service. DESIGN All child deaths were separately reviewed at a meeting attended by professionals across the healthcare pathway, and an assessment was made of contributory factors to death across domains intrinsic to ...

Over the years, national and sub-national governments have introduced several initiatives to improve access to maternal and child health services in India. However, financial barriers have posed major constraints. Based upon the data of National Family Health Survey (NFHS) round 4 for Odisha state, our paper examines the out-of-pocket expenditure (OOPE) borne by households for accessing materna...

BACKGROUND Despite free healthcare to pregnant women and children under the age of six, access to healthcare has failed to secure better child health outcomes amongst all children of the country. There is growing evidence of socioeconomic gradient on child health outcomes METHODS The objectives of this study were to measure inequalities in child mortality, HIV transmission and vaccination cov...

INTRODUCTION In Kenya, the maternal mortality rate had ranged from 328 to 501 deaths per 100,000 live births over the last three decades. To reduce these rates, the government launched in 2006 a means-tested reproductive health output-based approach (OBA) voucher program that covers costs of antenatal care, a facility-based delivery (FBD) and a postnatal visit in prequalified healthcare facilit...

The global child mortality rate has dropped significantly in the last two decades with Sub-Saharan Africa experiencing the fastest decline. However, Mali seems to be an exception, with a barely noticeable annual reduction rate of 1.8% between 1990 and 2011. We hypothesize that an increase in the number of climate shocks are partially responsible for the slow decline of child mortality in Mali. ...

BACKGROUND A multiple-strategy community intervention, known as National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), launched in India to improve the availability of and access to better-quality healthcare, especially for rural, poor mothers and children. The final goal of the intervention is to reduce maternal and child health inequalities across geographical areas, socioeconomic status groups, and sex of th...

In many areas of Ireland, children dying at home still have inadequate access to specialist palliative care. This causes unnecessary emotional and physical distress to the child, family, caregivers and healthcare professionals. Irish health policies aimed at improving the situation need to be fully resourced, structured, implemented, supported and evaluated. Timely referral of the child, advanc...