OBJECTIVES To explore systematically the care seeking trajectories of tuberculosis (TB) cases up to four subsequent places of care and to assess the type of services provided at each place. METHODS TB cases detected actively during the 2007-2009 national TB prevalence survey and passively under the routine programme in the same period were interviewed by administering a standardised questionn...

Introduction Informal patient payments for healthcare are common in the Western Balkans, negatively affecting public health and healthcare.   Aim To identify literature from the Western Balkans on what is known about informal patient payments and bought and brought goods, to examine their effects on healthcare and to determine what actions can be taken to tackle these payments.   Methods After ...

Under the table or informal payments in several middle and low income countries is a serious impediment to health care reform. These payments are effectively a form of systemic corruption. This report shows the efforts of a patient who seek health care for his ankle while being requested to pay under the table in hospital and private clinic. The data were collected by interview and surveying pa...

BACKGROUND Infectious disease surveillance has long been a challenge for countries like India, where 75% of the health care services are private and consist of both formal and informal health care providers. Infectious disease surveillance data are regularly collected from governmental and qualified private facilities, but not from the informal sector. This study describes a mobile-based syndro...

Health care costs incurred prior to the appropriate patient-provider transaction (i.e., transaction costs of access to health care) are potential barriers to accessing health care in low- and middle-income countries. This paper explores these transaction costs and their implications for health system governance through a cross-sectional survey of adult patients who received their first diagnosi...

The goals of the study were to describe the clients of home care and their care providers; to determine the competencies required to provide their care; to determine the costs of the formal care providers per client diagnoses; and to determine the burden of care for a randomly selected sample of informal care providers. Forty-nine percent of the 773 clients who participated in the study were ag...

Health care providers without formal medical qualifications provide more than 70% of all primary care in rural India. Training these informal providers may be one way to improve the quality of care where few alternatives exist. We report on a randomized controlled trial assessing a program that provided 72 sessions of training over 9 months to 152 informal providers (out of 304). Using standard...