Health and population; perspectives and issues最新文献

Despite rapid expansion in the maternal and child health and family planning services, there have been few attempts made to study the extent of utilisation of these services and their impact. The present study reports a simple method evolved in the quantification of utilisation of maternal care services (called maternal care receptivity - MCR), the relationship of factors such as age, parity, caste of the women and the distance of the health centre on the MCR and the impact of MCR on perinatal and neonatal mortalities. An inverse relationship was observed between MCR and perinatal and neonatal mortality rates and the two rates were three times less among babies born to mothers with high MCR scores compared to those with poor MCR scores.

Provision of adequate size of Ambulance fleet is a matter of concern for any hospital. For estimating ambulance requirements queuing analysis was used in this study. In this analysis incidence of long waiting times rather than mean waiting times were taken as the basis for estimating ambulance requirements in keeping with the desired service level.

Awareness of the economic manifestation of health and diseases and the limited resources allocated to health care services has brought to the focus a new discipline - health economics. Cost accounting, cost benefit, cost effectiveness methods etc. are increasingly becoming an integral part of the health management and evaluation of health programmes. Various concepts and problems relating to health economics are discussed in the present paper. More efforts should be made to conduct health economic studies in hospitals and health centres by which the process of standardisation of the concepts, would be easier. Health economics should also find its due place in the medical curriculum.

In June 1978, the Department of Social Welfare, Government of Maharashtra, commissioned the Centre for Development Studies and Activities (CDSA), Pune, to prepare an Action Programme for the Improvement of Health in the Tribal Areas of Maharashtra. The following is the brief report submitted by CDSA.

Time series analysis of out-patients at Urban Health Centre, Suraj Kund, Meerut, was done using the out-patient attendance of last five years, with the aim to find out the values to help in coping up with the problem of health administration and management. The least square method and ratio-to-trend method were adopted for calculating the secular trend and seasonal variations respectively. There was an increasing trend in out-patients attendance indicating the increasing popularity of the Urban Health Centre. It was found that in second and third quarter of the year the out-patient attendance increased extraordinarily due to various reasons. The two more aspects of time series, i.e. cyclical trend and irregular flactuation could not be analysed due to their insignificant impact over the health management system.

In this paper, the authors have dealt with the salient features of public relations function in a hospital situation while providing health care services to the patients. Public relations is an important function to build up corporate image of the hospitals in the minds of the public and the patients. The authors, therefore, suggest that proper attention may be paid to this aspect for greater appreciation of the services by the community at large.

The various TB surveys conducted in the country reveal that nearly 1.8 to 2 per cent of the population is suffering from active pulmonary tuberculosis and nearly one-fourth of these are sputum positive. Therefore, it is estimated that there will be nearly 8 million active TB cases, of which 2 million would be infectious. It is further estimated there will be at least 5,000,000 deaths per year due to TB. The Government of India, though constrained with the paucity of resources, is committed to control the disease within the shortest possible time. Given the case finding operations on a sporadic scale would identify those suffering from TB, this paper purports to construct a framework for systematic analysis of three alternative approaches to reduce and resolve the problem.

What type of person should be selected as Community Health Volunteer (CHV) has been a matter of debate. This study relates socio-economic characteristics--age, sex, marital status, education, caste, organisation membership and landownership--with performance on direct patient care, mother and child health, family welfare and environmental sanitation. The paper further suggests strategies for selection, training and support in case of CHVs whose performance is poor.

This is a pilot study undertaken by the authors to analyse the communication system as prevalent in health services at District Health Office (DHO) and five Primary Health Centres (PHCs) under it. The five PHCs were randomly selected under DHO Bellary. The authors study the nature of communication of correspondences pertaining to establishment matters, health intelligence and health activities for the first quarter of the financial year between the DHO and PHCs level, pinpoint deficiencies and list out suggestions.

Mathematical models have great potentialities as regards their utility in different disciplines of medicine and health. This paper attempts to elucidate their uses in the field. A brief mention of some models has also been made. Mathematical models are useful in epidemiologic research, planning and evaluation of preventive and control programmes, clinical trials, measurement of health, cost-benefit analysis, diagnosis of patients and in maximizing effectiveness of operations aimed at attaining specified goals within existing resources.