Beyond the regulatory radar: knowledge and practices of rural medical practitioners in Bangladesh.

Background: Informal and unregulated rural medical practitioners (RMPs) provide healthcare services to about two-thirds of people in Bangladesh, although their service is assumed to be substandard by qualified providers. As the RMPs are embedded in the local community and provide low-cost services, their practice pattern demands investigation to identify the shortfalls and design effective strategies to ameliorate the service.

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study in 2015-16 using a convenient sample from all 64 districts of Bangladesh.

Improving Physicians' Capacity for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Care through Blended E-learning: A Pilot Study in Bangladesh.

Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are often under diagnosed and managed without evidence-based approach in primary care settings. This may be due to gaps in knowledge and practice of using updated COPD guidelines by the physicians in public and private sectors in Bangladesh. To our knowledge, this is the first study in Bangladesh which aims to evaluate a blended e-learning approach for building capacity of physicians working at low-resource environments on COPD patient care.