BACKGROUND Rural township health centres and urban community health centres play a crucial role in the delivery of primary health care in China. Over the past two-and-a-half decades, these health institutions have not been as well developed as high-level hospitals. The limited availability and low qualifications of human resources in health are among the main challenges facing lower-level healt...

BACKGROUND Service readiness of health facilities is an integral part of providing comprehensive quality healthcare to the community. Comprehensive assessment of general and service-specific (i.e. child immunization) readiness will help to identify the bottlenecks in healthcare service delivery and gaps in equitable service provision. Assessing healthcare facilities readiness also helps in opti...

To improve the quality of health care in Nepal, supervision/ monitoring involving periodic visits by the district supervisor to health facilities (top-down approach) is in practice. It is not objectively implemented because of time and financial constraints and terrain of the country. To assess the effectiveness of a pre-tested strategy i.e. peer-group discussion with self-assessment piloted th...

BACKGROUND There is growing evidence that patients frequently bypass primary health care (PHC) facilities in favour of higher level hospitals regardless of substantial additional time and costs. Among the reasons given for bypassing are poor services (including lack of drugs and diagnostic facilities) and lack of trust in health workers. The World Health Report 2008 "PHC now more than ever" poi...

BACKGROUND The Ghanaian health sector has undertaken several policies to help improve the quality of care received by patients. This includes the construction of several health facilities, the increase in the training of health workers, especially nurses, and the introduction of incentive packages (such as salary increase) to motivate health workers. The important question is to what extent doe...

A study on community knowledge, attitudes and perception on malaria and its management was conducted in Mpwapwa district of central Tanzania in January-February 2001. Six villages, three with health facilities (Kibakwe, Makose and Mwanawota) and three without health facilities (Chogola, Kidenge and Wangi) lying between 975 and 1859 m above sea level were selected for the study. According to mos...

OBJECTIVES Socioeconomic status (SES) is a well-established risk factor for many health outcomes. Recently, we developed an SES measure based on 4 housing-related characteristics (termed HOUSES) and demonstrated its ability to assess health disparities. In this study, we aimed to evaluate whether fewer housing-related characteristics could be used to provide a similar representation of SES. S...

The function of a medical director is presented along with features of efficiency and deficiencies from the perspective of healthcare system improvement. A MEDLINE/Pubmed research was performed using the terms "medical director" and "director", and 50 relevant articles were selected. Institutional healthcare quality is closely related to the medical director efficiency and deficiency, and a cri...

The present decline in per capita expenditure on health in Saudi Arabia requires private funding to reduce pressure of health expenditure on the government budget. User charges would be an important source of revenue in the Kingdom where services cannot be cut and taxes are not imposed. User charges in public facilities would curtail over-utilization and reduce inefficient use of resources by p...