Listening to the Voices of Health Care Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Qualitative Study Providing In-Depth Insights Into Ethical and Individual Challenges.

In their daily practice, health care workers (HCWs) experience the effects of tensions between professional ethos and work realities, which can lead to ethical dilemmas. We aim to explore the ethical dilemmas that affected HCWs in Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic and to understand these in the context of the German health system. Between April and December 2022, we interviewed HCWs from various levels of care and key informants responsible for decisions related to HCWs in Germany.

Where is the bottleneck? Drones and the paradoxes of digitising medical supplies in Ghana's landscapes of care.

Implemented in several African countries, medical drones have emerged as a major infrastructural innovation in national healthcare systems and are widely hailed for improving, if not revolutionising, access to medicine and care for rural populations. Being based on digitally driven, autonomous aviation systems, drones are part of wider efforts to use digital technologies in health systems. In this article, we explore the paradoxes that emerge from definitions of as the bottleneck of quality healthcare.

Stock-outs! Improvisations and processes of infrastructuring in Uganda's HIV/Aids and malaria programmes.

This paper examines the stock-outs of medicines and diagnostic devices in Uganda. Our aim is to trace and compare interruptions in the supply of antiretrovirals and Rapid Diagnostic Tests in order to provide an ethnographic account of the complex role that improvisations play within global health infrastructures. We will argue that the fragmented and mobile infrastructures of these key global health technologies require and necessitate improvisations by the different actors involved as well as on almost all levels of the Ugandan health-care system.

Precarity and Preparedness: Non-Adherence as Institutional Work in Diagnosing and Treating Malaria in Uganda.

Access to anti-malarial drugs is increasingly governed by novel regulation technologies like rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs). However, high rates of non-adherence particularly to negative RDT results have been reported, threatening the cost-effectiveness of the two interrelated goals of improving diagnosis and reducing the over-prescription of expensive anti-malarial drugs. Below I set out to reconstruct prior treatment forms like presumptive treatment of malaria by paying particular attention to their institutional groundings.

Prototype Positive Control Wells for Malaria Rapid Diagnostic Tests: Prospective Evaluation of Implementation Among Health Workers in Lao People's Democratic Republic and Uganda.

Rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) are widely used for malaria diagnosis, but lack of quality control at point of care restricts trust in test results. Prototype positive control wells (PCW) containing recombinant malaria antigens have been developed to identify poor-quality RDT lots. This study assessed community and facility health workers' (HW) ability to use PCWs to detect degraded RDTs, the impact of PCW availability on RDT use and prescribing, and preferred strategies for implementation in Lao People's Democratic Republic (Laos) and Uganda.

The complexities of simple technologies: re-imagining the role of rapid diagnostic tests in malaria control efforts.

Background: Malaria rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) are assumed to be simple-to-use and mobile technologies that have the capacity to standardize parasitological diagnosis for malaria across a variety of clinical settings. In order to evaluate these tests, it is important to consider how such assumptions play out in practice, in everyday settings of clinics, health centres, drug stores and for community health volunteers.

Methods: This paper draws on qualitative research on RDTs conducted over the last nine years.