Mobile health (mHealth) applications have been developed for community health workers (CHW) to help simplify tasks, enhance service delivery and promote healthy behaviours. These strategies hold promise, particularly for support of pregnancy and childbirth in low-income countries (LIC), but their design and implementation must incorporate CHW clients' perspectives to be effective and sustainable. Few studies examine how mHealth influences client and supervisor perceptions of CHW performance and quality of care in LIC.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Adolescents are especially vulnerable due to increased biological, social and economic risks associated with early pregnancy and childbirth, yet most pregnancy and childbirth-related complications are preventable through a combination of proven, cost-effective clinical interventions including timely antenatal care (ANC). The voices and specific needs of adolescents are currently underrepresented in the literature on antenatal and maternity care. Objectives were to a) increase our understanding of adolescents' experiences with, and perceptions of, ANC and b) explore how these perspectives might be applied towards future initiatives to enhance adolescent care-seeking behaviour.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: About half of births in rural Tanzania are assisted by skilled providers. Point-of-care mobile phone applications hold promise in boosting job support for community health workers aiming to ensure safe motherhood through increased facility delivery awareness, access and uptake. We conducted a controlled comparison to evaluate a smartphone-based application designed to assist community health workers with data collection, education delivery, gestational danger sign identification, and referrals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe human leukocyte antigen DRB1 locus (HLA-DRB1) was typed in genomic DNA extracted from whole blood samples of 34 Mexican dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF) patients and 47 dengue fever (DF) patients, by polymerase chain reaction-sequence-specific oligonucleotide reverse dot blot. HLA-DRB1*04 was negatively associated with risk of DHF (OR 0.31, 95% CI 0.
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