The health variable used in the examples is the infant mortality rate (IMR) per 1,000 live births (LB), obtained from PAHO’s basic indicators for 1997.6 The other demographic indicators used come from the same source.6 The socioeconomic variable was gross national product (GNP) per capita, adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), obtained from the World Bank7 and also published in PAHO’s bas...

OBJECTIVE To assess the feasibility of deriving patient safety indicators for England from routine hospital data and whether they can indicate adverse outcomes for patients. DESIGN Nine patient safety indicators developed by the United States Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) were derived using hospital episode statistics for England for 2003-4, 2004-5, and 2005-6. A case-cont...

OBJECTIVE The relation between income and mortality due to violence has been studied in recent years. The Synthesis of Social Indicators of 2002 [Sintese de Indicadores Sociais, 2002], published by The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), states that one of the most outstanding characteristic of Brazilian society is inequality. The proposal of this ecological study was to tes...

background: poison control centre of morocco (mpcc) plays a key role in promoting health. this study was aimed to demonstrate the role of the mpcc in improving public health and poisoning management. methods: this was a retrospective study of poisoning cases reported to the mpcc between 1980 and 2011. the collected data included number of poisoning cases, profession of interlocutor who called t...

OBJECTIVE Assessment of the knowledge and application as well as perceived utility by doctors of clinical governance tools in order to explore their impact on clinical units' performance measured through mortality rates and efficiency indicators. METHODS This research is a cross-sectional study with a deterministic record-linkage procedure. The sample includes n = 1250 doctors (n = 249 chiefs...

Compression of mortality is measured here in four ways: 1) by standard deviation of the age at death above the mode; 2) by standard deviation of the age at death in the highest quartile; 3) by the inter-quartile range; and 4) by the shortest age interval in which a given proportion of deaths take place. The two first-mentioned are directed at old ages, while the other two measure compression o...

BACKGROUND Over the past several decades the efforts to improve maternal survival and the consequent demand for accurate estimates of maternal mortality have increased. However, measuring maternal mortality remains a difficult task especially in developing countries with weak information systems. Sibling histories included in household surveys (most notably the Demographic and Health Surveys (D...

The association between four-year mortality and some socioeconomic indicators has been studied in al Oslo men aged 40--49, invited to a screening programme for cardiovascular disease, and in a 'healthy' subgroup of participating men free of cardiovascular disease and diabetes at screening. The lowest social class exhibited a much higher total mortality than the other classes. This was pronounce...