South Asia

The authors evaluated the effectiveness of a training for facility-based health care providers, managers, and medical college faculty members that offered client-centered family planning services, including a module to explain the Islamic viewpoint on family planning. [adapted from abstract]

This initiative’s objective was to develop a standardized verbal autopsy training program and evaluate whether its implementation resulted in comparable knowledge required to classify perinatal cause of death by physicians and non-physicians. [from abstract]

This article reports on an intervention to enhance the knowledge and behavior of community health workers on providing adequate
education to patients on malaria. [adapted from author]

This study aimed to determine whether training of providers participating in franchise clinic networks is associated with increased family planning service use among low-income urban families in Pakistan.

This article describes the Morang Innovative Neonatal Intervention
(MINI), which tested a replicable model for the community management of neonatal infections within the existing government health system through the use of female community health volunteers. [adapted from author]

This protocol will test the effect of community mobilization through women’s groups, and health management committee strengthening, on institutional deliveries and home deliveries attended by trained health workers. [adapted from abstract]

This report documents the findings from a three day workshop on HIV
related stigma reduction for health care workers in India. The workshop was organized to test out an approach and materials for training health care workers about HIV related stigma in order to organize a large scale training program for health care workers and to build on the efforts of the World Bank to raise awareness on HIV stigma and discrimination. [adapted from introduction]

In one district of India, the authors used the WISN method to calculate the number of health workers required to achieve the maternal and child health service guarantees of the country and measured the difference between this ideal number and current staffing levels. [adapted from abstract]

This article examines the extent, motivation, and prevalence of village level health workers’ interaction with men concerning reproductive health issues in rural central India. [from author]

This study assessed the quality of care provided by community health workers in managing cases of severe acute malnutrition according to a treatment algorithm. [from abstract]

This comment reveals that despite what seem to be impressive gains in medical education and health research in Pakistan, the actual state of affairs is neither exciting nor remarkable. [from author]

This interview with Shaheen Hussain of Pakistan tells the story of how she became a field-based health educator with a social franchise of private reproductive health care providers and is a testimony of how this program not only touches the lives of the women who receive the reproductive health services but also of the health educators themselves.

This 5 minute video tells the story of Claire, a midwife from Harlow, who visited the slums of Delhi and rural clinics in Rajasthan to see what life is like for her Indian colleagues and saw the difference that innovative projects and passionate staff can make for mothers and babies. [adapted from publisher]

This case study explores the significant role of community-based initiatives and the process of collaborating with communit organziations to address HIV within communities of high-risk populations in India. [adapted from author]

In Pakistan, where gendered norms restrict women’s mobility, female community health workers (CHWs) provide doorstep primary health services to home-bound women. This study aims to understand how these cultural norms affect CHWs’ home-visit rates and the quality of services delivered. [from abstract]

Death certificates can provide valuable health status data regarding disease incidence, prevalence and mortality in a community to guide local health policy and help in setting priorities. This study evaluated the accuracy of death certificates at a tertiary care teaching hospital in a Karachi, Pakistan. [adapted from abstract]

This paper aims to describe the migration of medical specialists from Sri Lanka and to discuss the successes and failures of strategies to retain them. [from abstract]

This article describes the Lady Health Worker Program in Pakistan based on training women from local communities to provide specific, basic primary health-care treatment plus preventive services and the success of the program in enabling timely treatment, prevention and even screening. [adapted from author]

The objective of this assessment was to identify challenges in graduate public health education in Nepal, and explore ways to address these challenges. [from abstract]

This study aimed to examine the relationship between workforce capacity and quality of pediatric care in outpatient clinics in Afghanistan. [from abstract]

This study investigated how pregnant women and health care providers experience the existing antenatal and obstetric health care situation in Afghanistan. [from abstract]

The authors examined how informal health markets operate from the viewpoint of informal providers (those without any government-recognised medical degrees) by drawing upon data from a household survey in 2002, a provider census in 2004 and ongoing field observations from a research site in Koppal district, Karnataka, India. [adapted from author]

Improving educational capacity through nursing faculty development has been proposed as one of several strategies to address a complex health human resource situation. This paper describes and critically reflects upon the experience of one such faculty development programme in the state of Andhra Pradesh. [from abstract]

This article reports on a successful partnership to improve access and reduce family and community resistance to polio vaccination in India. The partners trained thousands of mobilizers from high-risk communities to visit households, promote government-run child immunization services, track children’s immunization history and encourage vaccination of children missing scheduled vaccinations, and mobilize local opinion leaders. [adapted from author]

This study examines the supply of, demand for, and policy
environment of private nurse production in four selected countries. [from abstract]

To improve the quality of health care in remote parts of Pakistan, a research project was initiated in the mountainous region of Gilgit-Baltistan using information and communication technology to improve patient care and support continuing education of health providers (eHealth). This paper describes the experience of nurses in using eHealth in their routine practices. [from abstract]

This research explores the factors that facilitate and impede community health network activation, framing, mobilisation and synthesis.India was selected as a case study as it represents a fertile context in which to explore community health networks given the diversity and density of community health NGOs and the dependency of the health care system on such providers. [adapted from author]

This document argues that the gap left by the public health system combined with a government policy of proactively promoting the private sector has led to the proliferation of private health providers which are unregulated, unaccountable and untrained, causing a serious threat to women’s health. [adapted from author]

The aim of this study was to understand medical career choices and the factors that influence medical students’ and young doctors’ career choices in Nepal and to understand what would encourage them to work in rural areas as generalists. [from abstract]

This article reports on a successful project using mobile phone technology for rapidly detecting and treating patients with malaria in a remote area of Bangladesh. [adapted from abstract]