BACKGROUND Poor and middle-income Thai people rely heavily on primary care health services. These are staffed by a range of professionals. However, it is unknown whether the performance of primary care varies according to the staffing and organization of local service delivery units. Tambon (sub-district) health promotion hospitals (THPHs) were introduced in 2009 to upgrade the services offered...

background very few studies have assessed performance of botswana public hospitals. we draw from a large research study assessing performance of the botswana ministry of health (moh) to evaluate the performance of public hospital system using the world health organization health systems performance assessment framework (who hspaf). we aimed to evaluate performance of botswana public hospital sy...

Of the hospitals that participated in the study, 22 (81.5%) were district level, 3 (11.1%) regional and 2 (7.4%) central hospitals. All 27 hospitals had a defibrillator present in the EC, the number varying from 1 (16 hospitals, 59.3%) to more than 3 (1 hospital, 3.7%). Defibrillator specification varied between facilities: 67% had biphasic, 15% monophasic and 18% both monoand biphasic defibril...

BACKGROUND Airborne infections pose a serious threat to susceptible individuals whenever they are together in confined spaces with patients coughing up tuberculosis (TB) bacilli. In healthcare facilities, those with infectious TB should, as far as possible, be isolated from non-infectious patients in order to prevent exposure to the infectious droplet nuclei generated by infected patients. AI...

BACKGROUND There is a growing emphasis on the need to tackle inadequate human resources for health (HRH) as an essential part of strengthening health systems; but the focus is mostly on macro-level issues, such as training, recruitment, skill mix and distribution. Few attempts have been made to understand the capability of health workers, their motivation and other structural and organizational...

There is a shortage of human resources in Africa but also poor management by governments with poor working environments and career paths in primary care1 and maldistribution of healthcare professionals. Post-apartheid South Africa saw black nurses moved out of hospitals dominated by white doctors to ‘nurse-driven’ district health services, citing ‘doctor shortage’. The government has struggled ...

OBJECTIVES We investigated the determinants of disparities in the regional density of private dentists in Austria. Specifically, we focused on the relationship between the density of private dentists and their public counterparts, thereby controlling for other possible covariates of dentist density. METHODS Dentist density was measured at the district level. We used panel data of dentist dens...

BACKGROUND The shortage and unequal distribution of medical doctors in low- and middle-income countries continues to be a public health concern. OBJECTIVE To establish the geographical distribution and demographic profile of medical doctors in public sector hospitals of the Limpopo Province, South Africa. METHOD The PERSAL system was used to obtain information on the number of medical docto...

This article summarises the findings of recent work on local authority public hospital services in England and Wales in the inter-war years and identifies the lack of a robust hypothesis to explain the variations found, particularly one that would explain the actions of county councils as well as county boroughs. Using public policy techniques on a group of local authorities in the far South We...

BACKGROUND Surgery is increasingly recognized as an important driver for health systems strengthening, especially in developing countries. To facilitate quality improvement initiatives, baseline knowledge of capacity for surgical, anaesthetic, emergency and obstetric care is critical. In partnership with the Malawi Ministry of Health, we quantified government hospitals' surgical capacity throug...