Publications by authors named "N Desmond"
Public health policies designed to improve individual and population health may involve coercion. These coercive policies require ethical justification, and yet it is unclear in the public health ethics literature which ethical concepts might justify coercion, and what their limitations are in applying across contexts. In this paper, we analyse a number of concepts from Western bioethics, including the harm principle, paternalism, the public interest, and a duty of easy rescue.
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- The study investigates the prevalence of undiagnosed HIV and schistosomiasis among fishermen in Malawi, aiming to evaluate integrated interventions for both conditions in lakeside communities.
- It employed a three-arm, cluster-randomized trial design involving male fishermen to compare different methods of promoting healthcare services—enhanced standard care, peer education, and peer distribution education.
- The outcomes measured included the rate of schistosomiasis and the uptake of HIV treatments and circumcision, with a focus on achieving these goals within 28 days post-intervention.
Background: HIV prevalence and incidence has declined in East, Central, and Southern Africa (ECSA), but remains high among female sex workers (FSWs). Sex worker programmes have the potential to considerably increase access to HIV testing, prevention, and treatment. We aimed to quantify these improvements by modelling the potential effect of sex worker programmes at two different intensities on HIV incidence and key health outcomes, and assessed the programmes' potential cost-effectiveness in order to help inform HIV policy decisions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProviding emergency care in low resource settings relies on delivery by lower cadres of health workers (LCHW). We describe the development, implementation and mixed methods evaluation of a mobile health (mHealth) triage algorithm based on the WHO Emergency, Triage, Assessment, and Treatment (ETAT) for primary-level care. We conducted an observational study design of implementation research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: We aimed to assess the prevalence, presentation and referral patterns of children with acute illness attending primary health centres (PHCs) in a low-resource setting.
Design, Setting And Participants: We conducted a secondary analysis of ASPIRE. Children presenting at eight PHCs in urban Blantyre district in southern Malawi with both recorded clinician and mHealth (non-clinician) triage data were included, and patient records from different data collection points along the patient healthcare seeking pathway were consolidated and analysed.