Publications by authors named "B Agins"

Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to evaluate the time taken for individuals to achieve viral load suppression after starting antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Brazil from 2015 to 2018, focusing on both personal and healthcare facility factors that may influence this timeline.
  • The research included 132,540 participants, revealing that a significant majority (89.4%) achieved viral suppression, with median time to suppression at 161 days, influenced by when they received their viral load tests.
  • The findings highlight the importance of individual characteristics and healthcare facility attributes in the suppression timeline, suggesting that improving viral load monitoring could enhance outcomes for people living with HIV.
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Ensuring quality in healthcare calls for a coordinated, systematic, congruous, and sustained approach. Nevertheless, it demands defining what the quality of healthcare means in the local context. Presently, the Malaysian healthcare system utilizes various definitions of quality of healthcare across the different initiatives and levels of healthcare, which can lead to fragmented or ineffective quality improvement.

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Background: Quality in healthcare is a fundamental pillar of health systems performance, leading to improved health outcomes and reduced waste. The World Health Organization recommends that countries establish a national quality policy and strategy (NQPS) to steer the provision of safe and high-performing healthcare services and foster a quality culture. This paper describes the development process and key content of Malaysia's new 5-year National Policy for Quality in Healthcare.

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Background: A growing number of nongovernmental organizations from high-income countries aim to provide surgical outreach for patients in low- and middle-income countries in a manner that builds capacity. There remains, however, a paucity of measurable steps to benchmark and evaluate capacity-building efforts. Based on a framework for capacity building, the present study aimed to develop a Capacity Assessment Tool for orthopaedic surgery (CAT-os) that could be utilized to evaluate and promote capacity building.

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Background: In 2020, the Health Resources and Services Administration's HIV/AIDS Bureau funded an initiative to promote implementation of rapid antiretroviral therapy initiation in 14 HIV treatment settings across the U.S. The goal of this initiative is to accelerate uptake of this evidence-based strategy and provide an implementation blueprint for other HIV care settings to reduce the time from HIV diagnosis to entry into care, for re-engagement in care for those out of care, initiation of treatment, and viral suppression.

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