Health-care availability, preference, and distance for women in urban Bo, Sierra Leone.

Objectives: To examine the diversity of the health-care providers in urban Bo, Sierra Leone, identify the types of health-care facilities preferred by women for fevers, and analyze the road network distances from homes to preferred health-care providers.

Methods: A population-based random sampling method was used to recruit 2419 women from Bo. A geographic information system was used to measure the road distance from each woman's home to her preferred provider.

Prevalence of cleft lip and cleft palate in rural north-central guatemala.

Objective: To estimate the number of new cases of cleft lip and cleft palate in the department (state) of Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, in 2012.

Design: Cross-sectional survey of midwives from communities identified through a two-stage cluster-sampling process. Midwives were asked how many babies they had delivered in the past year and how many of those newborns had various types of birth defects, as illustrated in pictures.

A geographic analysis of access to health services in rural Guatemala.

This paper uses road network analysis to quantify access to health care services in Alta Verapaz, a rural district in Guatemala with a majority Mayan population. Population data from the 2002 Guatemalan census, the location of health care facilities from the Ministry of Public Health and Social Assistance, and road and trail locations from the National Geographic Institute were included in a geographic information system (GIS). We computed the shortest path from each populated place to the nearest health care facility and then estimated the approximate travel time to the health facility based on road surface type.