BACKGROUND In order to scale up mental health care nationally, barriers to health services utilisation need to be identified and addressed. AIM The aim of this study was to identify barriers to mental health services utilization in Sudan from the perspectives of carer's of mentally ill patients and psychiatrists and to make recommendations to address the identified barriers. METHODS Mixed r...

It is generally agreed within information systems research that end-user computing (EUC) among professionals is critical to their job performance. The main assumption among IS-researchers is that software usage contributes to improved performance. This study suggests that end-user computing may influence job performance in a more comprehensive way than earlier assumed. To address this issue, a ...

Objective: To determine the variables which predict the utilisation of public and private primary health care services, incorporating a number of individual and provider-related variables which are thought to influence the utilisation of these services. Methods: The study employed a self-administered questionnaire to collect data from patients attending both public PHC centres and private dispe...

Wider adoption of the Grid concept has led to an increasing amount of federated computational, storage and visualisation resources being available to scientists and researchers. Distributed and heterogeneous nature of these resources renders most of the legacy cluster monitoring and management approaches inappropriate, and poses new challenges in workflow scheduling on such systems. Effective r...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the utilisation of eye disorder-related ambulatory medical services prior to the diagnosis of primary Sjögren's syndrome in female Taiwanese patients. DESIGN A nationwide, population-based case-control study. SETTING Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database. PARTICIPANTS A total of 347 patients with a diagnosis of primary Sjögren's syndrome from 2005 ...

BACKGROUND The high burden of diabetes for healthcare costs and their impact on quality of life and management of the disease have triggered the design and introduction of disease management programmes (DMPs) in many countries. The extent to which diabetes patients vary with regard to their healthcare utilisation and costs is largely unknown and could impact on the design of DMPs. The objective...

BACKGROUND Research on inequities in access to health care among asylum-seekers has focused on disparities between asylum-seekers and resident populations, but little attention has been paid to potential inequities in access to care within the group of asylum-seekers. We aimed to analyse the principles of horizontal equity (i.e., equal access for equal need irrespective of socioeconomic status,...

Hospital throughput is often studied and optimised in isolation, ignoring the interactions between hospitals. In this paper, critical care unit (CCU) interaction is placed within a game theoretic framework. The methodology involves the use of a normal form game underpinned by a two-dimensional continuous Markov chain. A theorem is given that proves that a Nash Equilibrium exists in pure strateg...

Physical Therapy (PT) and self-help groups (SHG) are important components of health care in rheumatic diseases. The utilisation of PT and SHG by patients with rheumatic diseases may be influenced by several factors. The aim of this study is to summarize the evidence on PT and SHG utilisation of patients with rheumatic diseases in Germany. We systematically searched the MEDLINE-database for stud...

Various studies have reported that university students, who are mostly young people, rarely use existing HIV/AIDS preventive methods. Although studies have shown that young university students have a high degree of knowledge about HIV/AIDS and HIV modes of transmission, they are still not utilising the existing HIV prevention methods and still engage in risky sexual practices favourable to HIV....