BACKGROUND Patient safety and quality care remain major challenges to Ghana's healthcare system. Like many health systems in Africa, this is largely because demand for healthcare is outstripping available human and material resource capacity of healthcare facilities and new investment is insufficient. In the light of these demand and supply constraints, systematic community engagement (SCE) in ...

The healthcare setting was important in the early spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in both Toronto and Taiwan. Healthcare workers, patients, and visitors were at increased risk for infection. Nonetheless, the ability of individual SARS patients to transmit disease was quite variable. Unrecognized SARS case-patients were a primary source of transmission, and early detection and...

Escalating healthcare costs and a sense of urgency to decrease medical errors and improve quality have increased efforts to improve efficiency in the delivery of healthcare services. One strategy to address these problems began many years ago in an unlikely place. The Toyota Production System (also known as Lean Production), originally inspired by Henry Ford’s assembly line approach to manufact...

BACKGROUND Under the National Health Mission (NHM) of India, Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) offers conditional cash transfer and support services to pregnant women to use institutional delivery care facilities. This study aims to understand community health workers' (ASHAs) and program officials' perceptions regarding barriers to and prospects for the uptake of facilities offered under the JSY. ...

Performance measurement is an important component of lean-based management systems, however cost management systems or analysis have largely been applied at a high level and have not attempted to measure or model the production cost impacts of disruption on a lean project. While it is important to develop systems for practical site management, it is equally important to ensure that such systems...

BACKGROUND Much of the unskilled and semi-skilled workforce in Thailand comprises migrant workers from neighbouring countries. While, in principle, healthcare facilities in the host country are open to those migrants registered with the Ministry of Labour, their actual healthcare-seeking preferences and practices, as well as those of unregistered migrants, are not well documented. This study ai...

Background.  Tuberculosis (TB) control is a public health priority with 3 million cases unrecognized by the public health system each year. We assessed the impact of improved TB diagnostics and on-site training on TB case detection and treatment outcomes in rural healthcare facilities. Methods.  Fluorescence microscopy, Xpert MTB/RIF, and on-site training were introduced at 10 healthcare facili...

BACKGROUND Ghana is one of the sub-Saharan African countries making significant progress towards universal access to quality healthcare. However, it remains a challenge to attain the 2015 targets for the health related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) partly due to health sector human resource challenges including low staff motivation. PURPOSE This paper addresses indicators of health work...

INTRODUCTION Surge capacity for optimization of access to hospital beds is a limiting factor in response to catastrophic events. Medical facilities, communication tools, manpower, and resource reserves exist to respond to these events. However, these factors may not be optimally functioning to generate an effective and efficient surge response. The objective was to improve the function of these...