Ministry of Health

Teaching collections are of great importance for science instruction at any level. There are several problems linked to the handling and curatorial management of this kind of collection. Among these is the relatively short life-span of specimens, due to the damage from continuous handling by students. Often the specimens used to replenish the teaching collection come from sampling in field.

Aim This audit was designed to compare current referral practice with the Ministry of Health elective services National Access Criteria for first Specialist Assessment (ACA) guidelines, to identify specific problems, and (if possible) to improve the use of acute dermatology services. Method Information regarding referral source, information provided, urgency and diagnostic accuracy, time interval between referral and consultation date, and

A new reimbursement system for general hospitals in Israel was introduced in July 1990. The new system specified that for 15 selected procedures, hospitals would be paid by the insurers prospectively, rather than by the traditional per-diem arrangement. The rates were determined by the Ministry of Health. Henceforth, the number of selected procedures has increased and by now 40 procedures are included. In line with the ever-lasting interest in the effect of financial incentives on suppliers of medical care, the purpose of this paper is to examine the first-year effect of this change on the volume of activity, length of stay, quality of care, and hospitals' real income. We focused on five selected procedures (cholecystectomy, hysterectomy, hip replacement, operations on lens and heart surgeries) performed in the four largest Israeli medical centers (Sheba, Sorasky, Rambam, and Hadassah). The analysis includes more than 17,000 hospitalizations occurring during two years prior to t...

This report on polio eradication encourages effective monitoring and accurate disease surveillance to improve the quality of health services and disease control and eradication initiatives. The information and tools in the report evolved from actual use during National Immunization Days (NIDs) and from field assessments in several African countries. While most of the materials were developed for polio eradication, the concepts and tools also apply to routine health services. National and district Ministry of Health program managers can use the report as a reference guide to monitor and supervise their country programs. For field staff and managers, the report is a valuable reference tool for planning country activities. The report's five sections include (1) a process that can be used to monitor services during NIDs, including a comprehensive list of indicators; (2) instructions for developing effective supervision checklists to assess the quality of performance during NIDs; (3...

Several groups have outlined methodologies for systematic literature reviews of the effectiveness of interventions. The Effective Public Health Practice Project (EPHPP) began in 1998. Its mandate is to provide research evidence to guide and support the Ontario Ministry of Health in outlining minimum requirements for public health services in the province. Also, the project is expected to disseminate the results provincially, nationally, and internationally. Most of the reviews are relevant to public health nursing practice. This article describes four issues related to the systematic literature reviews of the effectiveness of public health nursing interventions: (1) the process of systematically reviewing the literature, (2) the development of a quality assessment instrument, (3) the results of the EPHPP to date, and (4) some results of the dissemination strategies used. The eight steps of the systematic review process including question formulation, searching and retrieving the lit...

Type 2 diabetes is one of the most widespread diseases in the world. The main aim of this research was to evaluate the effect of combined therapy using acupressure therapy, hypnotherapy, and transcendental meditation (TM) on the blood sugar (BS) level in comparison with placebo in type 2 diabetic patients. We used “convenience sampling” for selection of patients with type

Turkey's National Health Information System (NHIS) aims to provide a nation-wide infrastructure for sharing the Electronic Health Records (EHRs). The current implementation supports the transfer of EHRs, called the "Transmission Schema" instances from the Family Medicine Information Systems (FMIS) and the Hospital Information Systems (HIS) to the NHIS servers at the Ministry of Health (MoH). During the localization of the

Reducing child mortality by facilitating universal access to safe vaccines of proven efficacy appears to be a moral obligation for the international community. Immunisation has brought enormous positive impacts on the health of children worldwide. In Malaysia, the National Immunisation Programme (NIP) was established in the 1950s with the missions of protecting the child population from vaccine-preventable diseases, reducing endemic cases, as well as decreasing the morbidity and mortality rates associated with vaccine-preventable diseases. However, there are an increasing number of individuals who perceived it as unsafe and unnecessary although vaccination programme has been recognised as one of the most successful preventive measures in public health. Thus, this article provides an overview regarding the potential factors that might contribute to vaccine hesitancy in Malaysia. Vaccine hesitancy issues could be explained based on the Health Belief Model (HBM) and 3s model by World Health Organisation (WHO). Several prominent factors have been associated with vaccine hesitancy, such as low awareness about the benefits of vaccination; availability, accessibility, and affordability; misconception and concern about side effects of vaccine; as well as preferred alternatives medicines. These factors might contribute to the increasing trend of Malaysian parents who choose not to vaccinate their children. Thus, more in-depth studies are warranted to tackle these pressing issues.

Brazil has become a country known as having one of the most extreme examples of the consequences of the hospital-based medicalization of delivery care, while a model of humanization of birth was developed in the State of Ceará in the 1970s. The Government of Japan, through the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA), collaborated with the Federal Ministry of Health of Brazil and the Government of the State of Ceará, in implementing the Maternal and Child Health Improvement Project in north-east Brazil (1996–2001). This project focused on ‘humanization of childbirth’, with training based intervention activities. Behavioral changes among health professionals who received the project's participatory type of training were described using rapid anthropological assessment procedure (RAP) survey results. Changes from ‘a culture of dehumanization of childbirth’ to ‘childbirth as a transformative experience’ were observed.

Background This article aims to investigate the processes, actors and other influencing factors behind the development and the national scale-up of the One Stop Crisis Centre (OSCC) policy and the subsequent health model for violence-response. Methods Methods used included policy analysis of legal, policy and regulatory framework documents, and in-depth interviews with key informants from governmental and non-governmental organisations in two States of Malaysia. Results The findings show that women's NGOs and health professionals were instrumental in the formulation and scaling-up of the OSCC policy. However, the subsequent breakdown of the NGO-health coalition negatively impacted on the long-term implementation of the policy, which lacked financial resources and clear policy guidance from the Ministry of Health. Conclusion The findings confirm that a clearly-defined partnership between NGOs and health staff can be very powerful for influencing the legal and policy environment in which health care services for intimate partner violence are developed. It is critical to gain high level support from the Ministry of Health in order to institutionalise the violence-response across the entire health care system. Without clear operational details and resources policy implementation cannot be fully ensured and taken to scale.

Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices test has been extensively used across a wide variety of settings in different countries all over the world as a fair culture measure of non-verbal intelligence. The objective of the present study is to extract norms of the test for Omani children. The test was applied on an individual basis on a random sample of 1042 children from different age groups ranging from 5 to 11 years old. All of the estimated psychometric properties including validity, reliability, and norms indicate that the test could be practically utilized when applied in several situations. The study has a number of implications including that the Ministry of Education may use it to diagnose and detect those children with learning difficulties; the Ministry of Health may use it in hospitals to measure the IQ of certain patients in order to make medical decisions. In addition, researchers in psychological and social areas would be able to conduct studies aiming at measuring th...

Hospital-acquired infection poses significant clinical and economic burden worldwide. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, infection control is a young, rapidly growing specialty. An infrastructure to expedite the growth of this important discipline is fast being established. The kingdom faces unique challenges when addressing infection control, which are the subject of this review. Much of the policy-making in domestic infection control is driven by the preventive medicine concerns of the annual pilgrimage (Hajj) to Mecca, which are unparalleled. The Saudi Ministry of Health acts to contain and control public health risks at this gathering of 2 million. Infectious hazards at the Hajj include meningococcal meningitis, respiratory tract infections, bloodborne diseases, and zoonotic diseases, all of which have international ramifications as pilgrimaging Muslims return home. In the wake of the extraordinary pace of modernization in Saudi Arabia, deficiencies in infection control remain, whi...

Very little information is available on budget and financing of mental health services in the world. During year 2001, WHO collected information from all countries on resources available for mental health care as a part of Project Atlas. The present report seeks to describe the situation regarding federal budgets and financing of mental health care at the country level. It also examines the association between relative allocation of health budget to mental health and mental health policy, programme and resource indicators in 89 countries. The information was collected through a questionnaire (with an accompanying glossary) that was sent to the mental health focal point in the Ministry of Health of each country. Eighty nine countries provided information on their mental health budget as a proportion of health budget. In addition, information was obtained on policy, programme and mental health resource indicators (beds, personnel, services to special population and availability of dru...

Disasters are fortunately rare occurrences. However, accurate and timely information and communication are vital to adequately prepare individual health organizations for such events. The current article investigates the health related communication and information systems for emergency management in Iran. A mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology was used in this study. A sample of 230 health service managers was surveyed using a questionnaire and 65 semi-structured interviews were also conducted with public health and therapeutic affairs managers who were responsible for emergency management. A range of problems were identified including fragmentation of information, lack of local databases, lack of clear information strategy and lack of a formal system for logging disaster related information at regional or local level. Recommendations were made for improving the national emergency management information and communication system. The findings have implications for health organizations in developing and developed countries especially in the Middle East. Creating disaster related information databases, creating protocols and standards, setting an information strategy, training staff and hosting a center for information system in the Ministry of Health to centrally manage and share the data could improve the current information system.

Sağlıkta Dönüşüm Programı’nın 2003 yılında ilan edilmesi ile alanda yapılan çalışmalar bu
döneme odaklanmakta; geçmiş politikalar yalnıza dönemsel olarak ele alınmaktadır. Bu durum
alan yazın açısından bir eksiklik olarak görülmekte ve kapsamlı bir çalışma ile Türkiye’de
sağlık hizmetlerinin tarihsel gelişimine yönelik bir analizin yapılmasını gerektirmektedir.
Çalışmada Türkiye’de sağlık hizmetlerinin gelişimine yer verilerek tarihsel süreç çerçevesinde
sağlık hizmetlerinin dönüşümü anlaşılmaya çalışılacaktır. Türkiye’de sağlık hizmetlerinin
gelişiminden sonra Türkiye’de sağlık hakkı ve sağlık hizmeti kavramlarının nasıl işlediği ele
alınarak sağlık yatırımlarının gelişimine yer verilecektir. Bu doğrultuda çalışmada sağlıkta
dönüşüm öncesi ve sonrasını daha iyi anlayabilmek adına birtakım politika metinleri ele
alınmıştır. Çalışma ile Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nin kuruluşundan itibaren devletin yapısal ve
işlevsel dönüşümüne neden olan reformların sağlık hizmetlerini nasıl dönüştürdüğü ele
alınmaktadır.

The main objective of this review is to provide a preliminary evaluation of the suitability of community-based organizations (CBOs) to contribute to HIV/AIDS prevention, care/support and control programs in Ethiopia. In order to put CBOs and programs in the context of HIV transmission and spread, the role of the Multisectoral HIV/AIDS Strategy (2000-2004) and other government policies and programs in

Background Community-based education (CBE) is part of the training curriculum for most health workers in Uganda. Most programs have a stated purpose of strengthening clinical skills, medical knowledge, communication skills, community orientation of graduates, and encouragement of graduates to work in rural areas. This study was undertaken to assess the scope and nature of community-based education for various health worker cadres in Uganda. Methods Curricula and other materials on CBE programs in Uganda were reviewed to assess nature, purpose, intended outcomes and evaluation methods used by CBE programs. In-depth and key informant interviews were conducted with people involved in managing CBE in twenty-two selected training institutions, as well as stakeholders from the community, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, civil society organizations and local government. Visits were made to selected sites where CBE training was conducted to assess infrastructure and learning resou...