BACKGROUND Skilled attendance at delivery is an important indicator in monitoring progress towards Millennium Development Goal 5 to reduce the maternal mortality ratio by three quarters between 1990 and 2015. In addition to professional attention, it is important that mothers deliver their babies in an appropriate setting, where life saving equipment and hygienic conditions can also help reduce...

The Standards-Based Management and Recognition (SBM-R(®)) approach to quality improvement was applied to maternal and newborn health services in Guinea, Mozambique, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. In every country, the quality of service delivery, as measured by clinical performance standards, improved following the intervention. The performance of evidence-based service delivery practices, as measured t...

OBJECTIVE To assess whether a shared decision-making intervention decreases the quantity of oxycodone tablets prescribed after cesarean delivery. TECHNIQUE A tablet computer-based decision aid formed the basis of a shared decision-making session to guide opioid prescribing after cesarean delivery. Women first received information on typical trajectories of pain resolution and expected opioid ...

Preliminary data were presented in a poster at the 14th annual Cochrane Colloquium in Dublin, Ireland, 23–26 October 2006. Final results were presented orally at the 68th Annual Meeting of the Society for Investigative Dermatology in Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A., 9–12 May 2007. This study was funded in part by National Cancer Institute grant K-07CA92550 (R.P.D.), National Institute of Health grant T...

INTRODUCTION Women represent a growing proportion of older people and experience increasing disability in their longer lives. Using a universally agreed definition of disability based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, this paper examines how, apart from age, social and economic factors contribute to disability differences between older men and women. M...

In "Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?" Jerry M. Burger reported a high base rate of obedience, comparable to that observed by Stanley Milgram (1974). Another condition, involving a defiant confederate, failed to significantly reduce obedience. This commentary discusses the primary contributions of Burger's study in terms of (a) its novel methodological variation on Milgram's o...

The article explores two key factors which contribute to shape the poor working conditions of nursing in Argentina. A first objective focuses on exploring the effect of the occupation's care component, closely associated with cultural images of "inherent" female qualities, on working conditions. A second objective aims to examine the way in which the organization of health services provision in...

This article provides an overview of the structure and evolution of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework and a short introduction to its use by scholars to analyze a diversity of puzzles. It then addresses the relationship of IAD to a more complex framework for the analysis of social-ecological systems and concludes with a short discussion of future challenges facing IAD s...

India accounts for the highest number of maternal and child deaths globally. A large body of empirical research suggests that improvement in the coverage of institutional delivery is essential to reduce the burden of maternal and child death. However the dynamics of choice of place of delivery is poorly understood. Using qualitative survey data consisting of twelve focus group discussions, cond...