Publications by authors named "Pedro Bernal-Lara"
Article Synopsis
- - Understanding health-seeking behaviors is essential for governments to manage health policies, especially during times of heightened anxiety, like the COVID-19 pandemic.
- - The study identifies four behavioral predictors (internal locus of control, impatience, optimism bias, and aspirations) that influence healthcare decisions among low-income women in El Salvador, showing that a strong internal locus of control significantly increases preventive health actions.
- - The research notes that while mothers' health decisions for themselves are strongly influenced by these drivers, the same is not as consistent for their children's health choices, indicating that stress and uncertainty during the pandemic may heighten these influences.
COVID-19 had severe direct and indirect effects on health and well-being in Latin America. To understand the extent to which disruptions among non-COVID-19-related health services affected population health, we used administrative data from the period 2015-21 to examine public hospital discharges and mortality for conditions amenable to health care in four Latin American countries: Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru. Between March 2020 and December 2021, hospitalization rates for these conditions declined by 28 percent and mortality rates increased by 15 percent relative to prepandemic years.
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- The Salud Mesoamérica Initiative (SMI) aims to improve maternal and child health in impoverished regions of Mesoamerica through a collaborative approach focusing on results-based aid.
- A study assessing the impact of this initiative from 2013 to 2018 in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras revealed that facility conditions and staffing improved, leading to an increase in institutional deliveries in intervention areas compared to controls.
- Additionally, the percentage of women opting for distant delivery facilities decreased significantly, indicating that better local health services encouraged women to choose nearby facilities for childbirth.
Background: In malaria elimination settings, available metrics for malaria surveillance have been insufficient to measure the performance of passive case detection adequately. An indicator for malaria suspected cases with malaria test (MSCT) is proposed to measure the rate of testing on persons presenting to health facilities who satisfy the definition of a suspected malaria case. This metric does not rely on prior knowledge of fever prevalence, seasonality, or external denominators, and can be used to compare detection rates in suspected cases within and between countries, including across settings with different levels of transmission.
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