Competing Narratives of Hospital Closure: A Case Study of Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island.

Background: Hospital closures have become commonplace in the United States but remain controversial. Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island was a 294-bed hospital in a disadvantaged community that closed in 2018 amid falling patient volume and rising costs.

Methods: Immersion/crystallization method of qualitative analysis was employed in reviewing semi-structured interviews, public testimony, and public documents.

Training Toward a Movement: Career Development Insights From the First 7 Years of a Global Health Equity Residency.

Background: The Doris and Howard Hiatt Residency in Global Health Equity and Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital provides global health training during residency, but little is known about its effect on participants' selection of a global health career.

Objective: We assessed the perceptions of residency graduates from the first 7 classes to better understand the outcomes of this education program, and the challenges faced by participants.

Methods: We interviewed 27 of 31 physicians (87%) who graduated from the program between 2003 and 2013 using a convergent mixed-methods design and a structured interview tool that included both open-ended and forced-choice questions.

Exogenous factors matter when interpreting the results of an impact evaluation: a case study of rainfall and child health programme intervention in Rwanda.

Objective: Public health interventions are often implemented at large scale, and their evaluation seems to be difficult because they are usually multiple and their pathways to effect are complex and subject to modification by contextual factors. We assessed whether controlling for rainfall-related variables altered estimates of the efficacy of a health programme in rural Rwanda and have a quantifiable effect on an intervention evaluation outcomes.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective quasi-experimental study using previously collected cross-sectional data from the 2005 and 2010 Rwanda Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), 2010 DHS oversampled data, monthly rainfall data collected from meteorological stations over the same period, and modelled output of long-term rainfall averages, soil moisture, and rain water run-off.

Rainfall variation and child health: effect of rainfall on diarrhea among under 5 children in Rwanda, 2010.

Background: Diarrhea among children under 5 years of age has long been a major public health concern. Previous studies have suggested an association between rainfall and diarrhea. Here, we examined the association between Rwandan rainfall patterns and childhood diarrhea and the impact of household sanitation variables on this relationship.