BACKGROUND Nearly four decades after the Alma-Ata declaration of 1978 on the need for active client/community participation in healthcare, not much has been achieved in this regard particularly in resource constrained countries like Ghana, where over 70 % of communities in rural areas access basic healthcare from primary health facilities. Systematic Community Engagement (SCE) in healthcare qua...

Doctor shopping is a common phenomenon in many countries. However, patterns of switching healthcare facilities on the same day were little known. The data were obtained from the longitudinal cohort datasets (LHID2010) of Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database in 2010. Of 1,000,000 persons of the cohort with 13,276,928 nonemergent visits, 185,347 patients had visited different heal...

We investigated whether straight-line distance from residential compounds to healthcare facilities influenced mortality, the incidence of pneumonia and vaccine efficacy against pneumonia in rural Gambia. Clinical surveillance for pneumonia was conducted on 6938 children living in the catchment areas of the two largest healthcare facilities. Deaths were monitored by three-monthly home visits. Ch...

OBJECTIVES Regular and quality CD4 testing is essential to monitor disease progression in people living with HIV. In Haiti, most laboratories have limited infrastructure and financial resources and have relied on manual laboratory techniques. We report the successful implementation of a national specimen referral network to rapidly increase patient coverage with quality CD4 testing while at the...

The main purpose of this study was to investigate effect of access to health facilities on the health status of rural households at Kermanshah Province. Statistical pupation of this study consisted of all heads of rural households at Bisotoun district in Harsin Township, Kermanshah Province, Iran (N=1020), that 278 of them were selected by the cluster random sampling method. The main instrument...

Not all eligible women use the available services under India's Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), which provides cash incentives to encourage pregnant women to use institutional care for childbirth; limited evidence exists on demand-side factors associated with low program uptake. This study explores the views of women and ASHAs (community health workers) on the use of the JSY and institutional del...

Background: Measuring healthcare quality and improving patient satisfaction have become increasingly prevalent, especially among healthcare providers and purchasers of healthcare. The aim of this study was; to evaluate the various aspects of quality assurance in Emergency Department, to evaluate patient satisfaction with emergency care, and to determine associated factors with patient satisfact...

background india’s health sector witnessed some major policy changes in 1990s that aimed at making health services more accessible to the population.   methods in this paper, i tried to present some preliminary results of the significant changes that occurred between 1995/6 and 2004, especially in relation to the question of access to healthcare for the poor and rural population using data from...

Despite the legal authority to confirm, override or modify healthcare insurance decisions made by physicians and government officials, health tribunal decisions have not been empirically analyzed. Using a novel quantitative methodology, all 387 Health Services Appeal and Review Board written and publicly available electronic decisions released over a five-year time period were statistically ana...