In a rural district hospital in Kenya, the authors screened 100 randomly selected outpatients for khat (miraa) chewing. A surprisingly high number of them admitted chewing khat leaves. The implications of this finding and the controversy about whether or not khat is a harmful drug are discussed.

Referral of extremely low birthweight infants (less than 1001 g) from district hospitals in a geographically defined area to a specialist regional centre significantly improved their chances of survival.

childbirth is associated with poorchild growth in developingcountries.We describe the association between psychologicalmorbidityduringpregnancy and lowbirthweight (52.5 kg).Acohort of 270 motherswas recruited froma district hospital in Goa,India; allmothers were interviewedwith a screening questionnaire for psychologicalmorbidity. Babies of 250 motherswere reviewed at birthtomeasure their weigh...

BACKGROUND The theme of the 2014 Southern African Rural Health Conference was 'Building resilience in facing rural realities'. Retaining health professionals in South Africa is critical for sustainable health services. Only 12% of doctors and 19% of nurses have been retained in the rural areas. The aim of the workshop was to understand from health practitioners why they continued working in the...

BACKGROUND We wanted to try to account for worker motivation as a key factor that might affect the success of an intervention to improve implementation of health worker practices in eight district hospitals in Kenya. In the absence of available tools, we therefore aimed to develop a tool that could enable a rapid measurement of motivation at baseline and at subsequent points during the 18-month...

The findings of a survey on the use of immunohistochemistry in district general hospitals in England and Wales are reported. Immunohistochemistry is used in most district hospitals, contributes to the accuracy and objectivity of some histopathological diagnoses, and is considered to be generally useful though not without drawbacks. Its expansion is being hindered by lack of funds for reagents a...

INTRODUCTION As part of a programme of research aiming to improve the outcomes of traumatically injured children, a multisource healthcare advocacy tool has been developed to allow trauma team members and hospital governance administrators to reflect and to act on complex trauma team-hospital systems interactions. We have termed this tool a Field Assessment Conditioning Tool (FACT). The FACT dr...