Agricultural extension continues to offer hope for improving the lives of rural poor in the developing world. Yet the difficulty of achieving that goal persists. This paper proposes a four-stage decision tree for implementing and evaluating the economic sustainability of extension programs that focuses on sources, delivery methods, evaluations, and fiscal support. It then evaluates the costeffe...

CONTEXT Diabetes is a chronic long-term disease with an increasing incidence. There is a need to increase access to effective care and to ensure such care is delivered as locally as possible. The geographical spread of NHS Highland Scotland presents additional challenges to ensuring a skilled workforce given education is normally work-based tuition and assessment. The aim of this pilot project ...

THE COST-EFFECTIVENESS OF THE KENTUCKY PILOT PROJECT OF ALLOWING PRIMARY PCI AT HOSPITALS WITHOUT ONSITE CABG

Context: Distributed agile development (DAD) approach has been adopted by the software companies for cost and time benefits. However, it causes significant challenges considering the contradicting nature of the agile and distributed development. Objective: The objective of this study is to develop a risk management framework that comprises the perceived risks in DAD projects, their causes and t...

A pilot study is one of the essential stages in a research project. This paper aims to describe the importance of and steps involved in executing a pilot study by using an example of a descriptive study in primary care. The process of testing the feasibility of the project proposal, recruitment of subjects, research tool and data analysis was reported. We conclude that a pilot study is necessar...

"This article reviews the experience of two pilot projects in Bangladesh that have addressed the question of how [operations] research can be designed to foster its utilization. In a rural field experiment [begun in 1972] in Matlab subdistrict, research has demonstrated that contraceptive services, if carefully designed and properly implemented, can influence demographic dynamics even where so...

One of the key roles of a junior doctor is co-ordinating the care of their patients and communicating with different departments or specialties within the hospital. To do this, junior doctors often spend a lot of time on a daily basis contacting the hospital switchboard in order to locate a required bleep/extension/fax number, or trying to navigate an intranet based directory which can be diffi...

BACKGROUND Community service-learning (CSL) has been proposed as one way to enrich medical and dental students' sense of social responsibility toward people who are marginalized in society. AIM We developed and implemented a new CSL option in the integrated medical/dental curriculum and assessed its educational impact. METHODS Focus groups, individual open-ended interviews, and a survey wer...