Int J Health Plann Manage
January 2025
Future hospitals must be able to adapt in many ways to the changing demands on their roles and functions within evolving healthcare delivery infrastructures. These include changing population structures and needs, new models of healthcare provision, technological advances, and innovations in design, all while enhancing their environmental sustainability. This article sets out the issues that those determining healthcare policy and designing future hospitals must consider if they are to become and remain fit for purpose within the wider health and social care system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAllied prisoners of war (POWs) working on the Imperial Japanese Army's railroad from Thailand to Burma during 1943-1945 devised a blood transfusion service to rescue severely ill fellow prisoners who were otherwise unlikely to survive the war. Extant transfusion records (1,251 recipients, 1,189 donors) in ledger books held by the United Kingdom National Archives at Kew were accessed and analyzed. Survival to the end of the war in 1945 was determined from Commonwealth War Graves Commission records.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Health Plann Manage
January 2025
Health care is changing rapidly. Hospitals are, and will remain, an essential setting to deliver it. We discuss how to maximise the benefits of hospitals in the future in different geographic and health system settings, highlighting a series of cross-cutting issues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe emergent threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has resulted in debates around the use and preservation of effective antimicrobials. Concerns around AMR reflect a history of increasing dependence on antibiotics to address disease epidemics rooted in profound structural and systemic challenges. In the context of global health, this process, often referred to as pharmaceuticalisation, has commonly occurred within disease programmes, of which lessons are vital for adding nuance to conversations around antimicrobial stewardship.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSignificance: The interference-holographic method of phase scanning of fields of scattered laser radiation is proposed. The effectiveness of this method for the selection of variously dispersed components is demonstrated. This method made it possible to obtain polarization maps of biological tissues at a high level of depolarized background.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe aimed developing and experimentally validating methods for 3D scale-selective polarimetry of multiply scattered fields in diffuse myocardium layers for mechanical myocardial injury prescription histological differential diagnostics. We used the synthesis of diffuse object field polarization-interference registration and polarization-inhomogeneous field digital holographic reconstruction and layer-by-layer complex amplitudes distributions The method for selection single and diffuse object field multiply scattered components polarization maps is proposed. The conditions for eliminating the distorting influence of a depolarized background high level are found.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Lancet celebrates its 200th anniversary in 2023. In this survey of the journal's history, we explore how it has contributed to shaping medicine both in the UK and internationally, and how it has demonstrated a commitment to "The best science for better lives". For two centuries, the journal has published pioneering articles on key developments in medical science and the organisation of health care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA Mueller matrix imaging approach is employed to disclose the three-dimensional composition framework of optical anisotropy within cancerous biotissues. Visualized by the Mueller matrix technique spatial architecture of optical anisotropy of tissues is characterised by high-order statistical moments. Thus, quantitative analysis of the spatial distribution of optical anisotropy, such as linear and circular birefringence and dichroism, is revealed by using high-order statistical moments, enabling definitively discriminate prostate adenoma and carcinoma.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOur contribution to this special issue examines the early history of international striving for universal health care, from the perspective of the World Health Organisation's (WHO's) Regional Office for Africa (AFRO). The aspiration was repeatedly reframed, from 'strengthening health services' in the 1948 constitution of the World Health Organisation (WHO), to 'Health For All' through primary health care (PHC) in the 1970s, to today's articulations of universal coverage and 'health systems strengthening'. We aim to establish how AFRO supported member states in implementing these policies up to the mid-1980s, and with what degree of success.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Chemotherapy with or without immunotherapy remains the mainstay of treatment for triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). A subset of TNBCs express the androgen receptor (AR), representing a potential new therapeutic target. This study assessed the feasibility of adjuvant enzalutamide, an AR antagonist, in early-stage, AR-positive (AR +) TNBC.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In the nearly half century since it began lending for population projects, the World Bank has become one of the largest financiers of global health projects and programs, a powerful voice in shaping health agendas in global governance spaces, and a mass producer of evidentiary knowledge for its preferred global health interventions. How can social scientists interrogate the role of the World Bank in shaping 'global health' in the current era?
Main Body: As a group of historians, social scientists, and public health officials with experience studying the effects of the institution's investment in health, we identify three challenges to this research. First, a future research agenda requires recognizing that the Bank is not a monolith, but rather has distinct inter-organizational groups that have shaped investment and discourse in complicated, and sometimes contradictory, ways.
Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer globally in men, and in some countries is now the most diagnosed form of cancer. It is necessary to differentiate between benign and malignant prostate conditions to give accurate diagnoses. We aim to demonstrate the use of a 3D Mueller matrix method to allow quick and easy clinical differentiation between prostate adenoma and carcinoma tissues with different grades and Gleason scores.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLayered topographic maps of the depolarisation due to diffuse biological tissues are produced using a polarisation-holographic Mueller matrix method approach. Histological sections of myocardial tissue with a spatially structured optically anisotropic fibrillar network, and parenchymal liver tissue with a polycrystalline island structure are successfully mapped. The topography of the myocardium maps relates to the scattering multiplicity within the volume and the specific morphological structures of the biological crystallite networks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHist Cienc Saude Manguinhos
September 2020
We examine the efforts of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to extend medical care under social security, through international conventions, advocacy and technical assistance. We consider the challenges faced by the ILO in advancing global health coverage through its labourist, social security model. The narrative begins in the interwar period, with the early conventions on sickness insurance, then discusses the rights-based universalistic vision expressed in the Philadelphia Declaration (1944).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article discusses the early postwar history of international engagement with the strengthening of health services by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Standard narratives emphasise that the WHO prioritised vertical programmes against specific diseases rather than local capacity-building, at least until the Alma Ata Declaration of 1978 launched a policy focus on primary health care. There was, however, a longer lineage of advisory work with member states, and our aim is to examine this intellectual and policy history of health services planning and administration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough China's community health system helped inspire the 1978 Alma Ata Declaration on Health for All, it currently faces the challenge of strengthening primary care in response to hospital sector dominance. As the world reaffirms its commitment towards primary health services, China's recent history provides a salient case study of the issues at stake in optimizing the balance of care. In this study, we have used path dependence analysis to explain China's coevolution of hospital and primary care facilities between 1949 and 2018.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSince recently, a number of innovative polarization-based optical imaging modalities have been introduced and extensively used in various biomedical applications, with an ultimate aim to attain the practical tool for the optical biopsy and functional characterization of biological tissues. The techniques utilize polarization properties of light and Mueller matrix mapping of microscopic images of histological sections of biological tissues or polycrystalline films of biological fluids. The main drawback of currently developed laser polarimetry approaches and Mueller matrix mapping techniques is poor reproducibility of experimental data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Lichen planus (LP) is a chronic inflammatory mucocutaneous disease that commonly affects the oral cavity. Previous reports have suggested a possible association between LP and thyroid gland diseases (TGDs). The purpose of this study was to investigate possible associations between oral lichen planus (OLP) and TGDs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStronger primary care has been associated with important contributions to health system performance, yet countries struggle to resource it adequately, given competing demands from hospitals. Although historically China has originated influential models of primary health care, it has an enduring problem with hospital dominance in health service delivery. This paper is a historical analysis of the co-evolution of hospitals and primary care providers in China from 1835 (the year when the first hospital was built in mainland China) to 1949 (the year when the People's Republic of China was founded), which aims to shed light on approaches to primary care strengthening.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article explores the programme of national health planning carried out in the 1960s in West and Central Africa by the World Health Organization (WHO), in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Health plans were intended as integral aspects of economic development planning in five newly independent countries: Gabon, Liberia, Mali, Niger and Sierra Leone. We begin by showing that this episode is treated only superficially in the existing WHO historiography, then introduce some relevant critical literature on the history of development planning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Advanced-stage endometrial cancers have limited treatment options and poor prognosis, highlighting the need to understand genetic drivers of therapeutic vulnerabilities and/or prognostic predictors. We examined whether prospective molecular characterization of recurrent and metastatic disease can reveal grade and histology-specific differences, facilitating enrollment onto clinical trials.
Experimental Design: We integrated prospective clinical sequencing and IHC data with detailed clinical and treatment histories for 197 tumors, profiled by MSK-IMPACT from 189 patients treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
This article examines the development of health system metrics by international organizations, exploring their relationship to the politics of world health. Current historiography treats measurement either as progressive illumination or adopts a critical stance, viewing indicators as instruments of global governance by powerful nations. We draw on diverse statistical publications to provide an empirical overview of change and continuity, beginning with the League of Nations Health Organization, which initiated health system statistics, and concluding with the , with its controversial comparative rankings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe UN Sustainable Development Goals of 2015 have restored universal health coverage (UHC) to prominence in the international health agenda. Can understanding the past illuminate the prospects for UHC in the present? This article traces an earlier history of UHC as an objective of international health politics. Its focus is the efforts of the International Labor Organization (ILO), whose Philadelphia Declaration (1944) announced the goal of universal social security, including medical coverage and care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Health Polit Policy Law
February 2018
Britain's National Health Service (NHS) is a universal, single-payer health system in which the central state has been instrumental in ensuring equity. This article investigates why from the 1970s a policy to achieve equal access for equal need was implemented. Despite the founding principle that the NHS should "universalize the best," this was a controversial policy goal, implying substantial redistribution from London and the South and threatening established medical, political, and bureaucratic interests.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTau is a microtubule-associated protein that is highly soluble and natively unfolded. Its dysfunction is involved in the pathogenesis of several neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease (AD), where it aggregates within neurons. Deciphering the physiological and pathogenic roles of human Tau (hTau) is crucial to further understand the mechanisms leading to its dysfunction in vivo.
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