It is a fact that global health indicators in vulnerable populations are not improving, despite all resources concentrated in this area. Therefore, as a teacher and researcher in an international doctorate in Public Health, I took advantage of the contact with health professionals from Colombia, Peru and Bolivia (they were all my students) to try to better understand which factors may be affect...

OBJECTIVE A growing body of research supports the value of mental health intervention to treat people affected by disasters. This study used a mixed-methods approach to evaluate pre- and posthurricane mental health service use in Florida nursing homes. METHODS A questionnaire was administered to 258 directors of nursing, administrators, and owners of nursing homes, representing two-thirds of ...

BACKGROUND The California Endowment's Healthy Eating, Active Communities program was designed to reduce disparities in the incidence of obesity by improving food and physical-activity environments for low-income children. It was recognized at the outset that to succeed, the program needed support from community advocates. Health care providers can be effective advocates to mobilize community me...

Continuous evaluation of performance and outcomes leading to improvement is currently the focus of continuous quality improvement (CQI) programmes in ambulatory surgery. This can be implemented by developing clinical indicators and acceptable thresholds that are relevant to daily practice, easy to measure and can be used to initiate the analytic process. Collection of data without the ability t...

The ability to monitor usage of groups of workstations is quite useful for planning growth, facility hours, staffing and other issues; but in our case, both the format of the data (/var/adm/wtmp) and the fact that the data was spread over hundreds of different workstations made any analysis difficult at best. In this paper, we explore the use of a relational database to collect all the raw data...

This study examined beliefs about the delivery of medical abortion services and current roles of 76 providers of methotrexate-induced abortion. The sample included physicians, midlevel professionals, administrators, and counselors/other medical staff. Over 75% of participants believed that, given proper training and emergency backup, physicians and midlevel clinicians alike could provide medica...

OBJECTIVE To measure the impact of a maternal health package on health facility delivery and stillbirth rates. METHODS This is a cross-sectional study in Ethiopia where a maternal package was integrated into eight health centers across three regions. The package included trained midwives with a mentoring program, transport for referral, and equipment and accommodation for the midwives. Ten he...

This article uses a human factors evaluation framework to assess the usability of commercially available videophone technology. One study focuses on minimally functionally impaired seniors living in an assisted living facility. The second study focuses on usability for hospice staff. Seniors found the technology easy to use and were willing to accept the equipment in their homes, especially if ...

BACKGROUND The elderly population is increasing in Vietnam. Access to health services for the elderly is often limited, especially for those in rural areas. User fees at public health care facilities and out-of-pocket payments for health care services are major barriers to access. With the aim of helping the poor access public health care services and reduce health care expenditures (HCE), the ...