OBJECTIVE To identify factors associated with breastfeeding in the first hour of life (Step 4 of the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative). METHODS A cross-sectional study was conducted with a representative sample of mothers who gave birth in maternity wards in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Southeastern Brazil, between 1999 and 2001. Newborns or mothers with restriction to breastfeeding were excl...

BACKGROUND Provision of essential newborn care (ENC) can save many newborn lives in poor resource settings but coverage is far from universal and varies by country and place of delivery. Understanding gaps in current coverage and where coverage is good, in different contexts and places of delivery, could make a valuable contribution to the future design of interventions to reduce neonatal morta...

BACKGROUND Trained birth attendants at delivery are important for preventing both maternal and newborn deaths. West Java is one of the provinces on Java Island, Indonesia, where many women still deliver at home and without the assistance of trained birth attendants. This study aims to explore the perspectives of community members and health workers about the use of delivery care services in six...

BACKGROUND Every pregnant woman is considered to be at risk and some risks may not always be foreseeable or detectable. Therefore, the presence of a skilled birth attendant at every delivery is considered to be the most critical intervention in reducing maternal mortality and morbidity. In Ethiopia, the proportion of births attended by skilled personnel in urban settings can be as low as 10%. T...

Institutional ethics committees remain largely absent from the literature on error reduction and patient safety. In this paper, the author endeavors to fill the gap. As noted in the Hastings Center's recent report, "Promoting Patient Safety," the occurrence of medical error involves complex web of multiple factors. Human misstep is certainly one such factor, but not the only one. This paper bui...

The long-term care (LTC) literature has been generally associated with industrialized countries. However, LTC needs are increasing in the developing world at a rate that far exceeds than experienced by industrialized countries. Using China as a case study, the purpose of this report is to provide an example of an emerging institutional care system for rural elders in a rapidly developing countr...

Protecting the safety and welfare of clinical trial subjects is the primary responsibility of the multidisciplinary ethics committee. In India, ethics committees have come under increasing criticism for functioning as "secret societies unaccountable to the public" (1). Yet, little effort has been made to undertake qualitative research on the ethics review bodies. This article describes the esse...

OBJECTIVE To compare the attitudes toward and perceptions of institutional practices that can influence patient safety between all professional groups at a university medical center. DESIGN A questionnaire measuring nine dimensions of organizational and safety culture was distributed to all hospital workers. Each item was rated on a 1 ('strongly disagree') to 5 ('strongly agree') scale. PAR...

In this paper we discuss how literacy has been positioned within the senior secondary curriculum and how different views of literacy are situated in the curriculum through disciplinary and institutional practices. We discuss a research project where we have drawn on three definitions of literacy – a print-oriented, language oriented or semiotic view – to conduct an linguistic analysis of syllab...

The healthcare sector is one where two co-existing and competing institutional logics – professional and market logics – occur. Following extant research on institutional logics and institutional work, we propose to understand “what microprocesses and institutional practices do institutional actors enact during the implementation of healthcare IT system? What are the impacts of these practices ...