OBJECTIVE To describe out-of-pocket costs of inpatient care for children under 5 years of age in district hospitals in Kenya. METHODS A total of 256 caretakers of admitted children were interviewed in 2-week surveys conducted in eight hospitals in four provinces in Kenya. Caretakers were asked to report care seeking behaviour and expenditure related to accessing inpatient care. Family socio-e...

OBJECTIVE To study the practice of nosocomial infection (NI) control in district hospitals. MATERIAL AND METHOD Descriptive study using questionnaires and group discussion. RESULTS From February-March 2002, five district hospitals in the northern region of Thailand were randomly enrolled. All members of the infection control committee (ICC) were included and data were available from 71 memb...

1 Departments of Emergency and Surgery, Emergency Surgery and Trauma Surgery Unit, Trauma Center, Maggiore Hospital–Bologna Local Health District, Bologna, Italy, 2 Department of Radiology, Maggiore Hospital–Bologna Local Health District, Bologna, Italy, 3 Department of Emergency and Transplant Surgery, S. Orsola Malpighi University Hospital, Bologna, Italy, 4 Addington Hospital, Durban, KwaZul...

OBJECTIVES To determine work stress, and stress-coping strategies, and to analyze their the relationships in order to improve health-promoting lifestyle of nurses in Taiwan. METHODS Three hundred eighty-five nurses who had work experience for more than 6 mo, were selected from four district hospitals in Kaohsiung and Ping Tung. We used a stratified cluster random sampling method for the selec...

BACKGROUND District hospital services in Kenya and many low-income countries should deliver proven, effective interventions that could substantially reduce child and newborn mortality. However such services are often of poor quality. Researchers have therefore been challenged to identify intervention strategies that go beyond addressing knowledge, skill, or resource inadequacies to support heal...

Objective To evaluate progress made at district level in Malawi towards reaching the 5th Millennium Development Goal, the reduction of maternal mortality. Methods In 2006, community-based maternal mortality in Thyolo, Malawi was calculated by applying the 'sisterhood method', a survey that relies on participants responding to basic questions about maternal mortality in their families. Results ...

After widespread use and misuse of antimalarial drugs led to the emergence of resistance, new guidelines for malaria treatment with artemisinine-based combination therapy (ACT) were introduced in Burkina Faso in 2005. To describe the management (drug therapy and other practices) of patients with suspected malaria before their admission to the district hospital of Dô, seven years later. This cro...

PROBLEM Despite the Government's effort to expand services to district level, it is still hard for people living with HIV to access antiretroviral treatment (ART) in rural Zambia. Strong demands for expanding ART services at the rural health centre level face challenges of resource shortages. APPROACH The Mumbwa district health management team introduced mobile ART services using human resour...

There has been much opposition, voiced most notably in the Tunbridge Report, to general-practitioner access to hospital rehabilitation services. Co-operation between general practitioners, physiotherapists, and the consultant with responsibility for the physiotherapy department at a general district hospital has provided an efficient open-access service. This service has been welcomed by the ge...

Despite the availability of effective medical treatment and disease management guidelines, asthma remains a poorly controlled disease in developing countries. There is little evidence of the effectiveness of disease management guidelines in rural clinical practice. The effect of disease management guidelines on clinical outcomes and quality of life in asthmatic patients in a rural community hos...