South Africa is an upper-middle-income country with widespread social and geographical inequality of surgical provision. The National Forum on Surgery and Anaesthesia in South Africa brought together various stakeholders, including government, societies, academic clinicians and the biomedical industry, to define the core strategy for a national surgical plan. During the forum, presentations and...

Although the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and health is well documented for developed countries, less evidence has been presented for developing countries. The aim of this paper is to analyse this relationship at the household level for Fiji, a developing country in the South Pacific, using original household survey data. To allow for the endogeneity of SES status in the hous...

A retrospective review of hospital and available community records of 47 children undergoing orchidopexy in a district hospital was undertaken to determine adequacy of screening for cryptorchidism and factors associated with late referral. Twenty eight of these boys were previously examined on 108 occasions. Diagnosis was missed on 32 occasions and the record of 38 clinical examinations did not...

BACKGROUND Intervention coverage and funding for the control of malaria in Africa has increased in recent years, however, there are few descriptions of changing disease burden and the few reports available are from isolated, single site observations or are of reports at country-level. Here we present a nationwide assessment of changes over 10 years in paediatric malaria hospitalization across K...

To the Editor: The evaluation of the surgical outreach programme to district hospitals in Sisonke Health District (SHD), KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (SA), recently published in the SAMJ demonstrates an admirable commitment to improving district health services. While the authors documented a large number of flying hours and kilometres travelled and 2 160 operations performed over a 6-month peri...

background: nowadays hospitals have to cope with global changes. they are thus forced to be equipped with learning and learning hospitals. this research was performed to design a model for establishing learning organization in iranian public hospitals. methods: this qualitative, comparative, cross-sectional study was conducted in 2009-2010. first, available models of learning organization in ge...

purpose: body image is a person’s body shape in his/her mind. negative body image is associated   with low self-esteem, depression, eating disorder and body dimorphic disorder. the aim of   this study was to investigate the role of body image on sexual performance of married women   nurses in tehran.   materials and methods: in this correlation study, 200 married women nurses working in public ...

In 2008, the American Academy of Dermatology began sponsoring North American dermatology residents to travel to Botswana in sub-Saharan Africa and spend 4 to 6 weeks working with the Botswana-UPenn Partnership, the Baylor International Pediatrics AIDS Initiative, Princess Marina Hospital, and surrounding smaller district hospitals. During their time in Botswana, the residents staff the busy out...

Described in an analysis of the cost to the Ministry of Health of providing district health services in Malawi, with particular emphasis on the district hospital. District resource allocation patterns were assessed by carefully disaggregating district costs by level of care and hospital department. A strikingly low proportion of district recurrent costs was absorbed by salaries and wages (27-39...

Enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) protocols are now achieving worldwide diffusion in both university and district hospitals with special interest in colorectal surgery. The optimization of the patient's preoperative clinical conditions, the careful intraoperative administration of fluids and drugs and the postoperative encouragement to resume the normal physiological functions as early as ...