Background: Innovative schemes to ensure the participation of private practitioners (PPs) in the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme (RNTCP) are necessary to identify and treat all patients with tuberculosis (TB). We developed a novel public-private mix (PPM) model to encourage PPs to practise DOTS and participate in the RNTCP while retaining their patients.
Methods: The Resource Group for Education and Advocacy for Community Health (REACH) developed and implemented the programme in partnership with the Chennai local health authority and the Tuberculosis Research Centre, Chennai, India. PPs were sensitised to the RNTCP and DOTS through a one-to-one approach or group meetings, and were assisted in referring patients. Surveys were carried out at baseline and at the completion of the study to assess changes in attitudes and practices.
Results: Six hundred PPs underwent sensitisation about the RNTCP, after which the proportion of PPs adopting DOTS increased significantly (P < 0.001), and the majority (72.8%) used sputum testing for diagnosing TB. The proportion of PPs who used X-ray alone for diagnosis declined to 16.0% from a baseline of 45.4%.
Conclusions: This PPM model, which emphasises sustained advocacy for DOTS and allows PPs to retain private patients, looks promising and needs to be tested at other sites.
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Sci Rep
January 2025
Faculty of Engineering, Université de Moncton, Moncton, NB, E1A3E9, Canada.
Diabetes is a growing health concern in developing countries, causing considerable mortality rates. While machine learning (ML) approaches have been widely used to improve early detection and treatment, several studies have shown low classification accuracies due to overfitting, underfitting, and data noise. This research employs parallel and sequential ensemble ML approaches paired with feature selection techniques to boost classification accuracy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHeliyon
January 2025
Department of Managing Health Services & Hospitals, College of Business (COB), Faculty of Business Rabigh, King Abdulaziz University, Box 344, 21991, Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Advertising for dental services in Jordan is subject to regulation. Dental professionals must obtain approval from their respective councils before initiating any advertising campaigns to ensure compliance with ethical and professional standards. Although the dental advertising landscape in Jordan has made considerable progress, research on dentists' perspectives regarding advertising in the country remains limited.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealth Policy
January 2025
Centre for Health Policy and Management, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
Objectives: To identify health system contexts and mechanisms influencing general dental practitioners' (GDPs) participation in state funded, contracted primary oral healthcare.
Methods: Peer-reviewed articles and other sources were identified via EMBASE, Medline (OVID), Web of Science and Google Scholar databases, grey literature search, citation tracking and expert recommendations. Studies meeting the inclusion criteria were assessed for rigour, relevance and richness, and coded to identify data relating to contexts, mechanisms and outcomes.
PLoS One
January 2025
Faculty of Psychology, Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
The Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) is a widely used self-report measure of subjective well-being, but studies of its measurement invariance across a large number of nations remain limited. Here, we utilised the Body Image in Nature (BINS) dataset-with data collected between 2020 and 2022 -to assess measurement invariance of the SWLS across 65 nations, 40 languages, gender identities, and age groups (N = 56,968). All participants completed the SWLS under largely uniform conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFoot Ankle Int
January 2025
Howard Head Sports Medicine at Vail Health, Vail, CO, USA.
Background: Activity level is a benchmark to document patient recovery; however, there is a lack of instrumentation to measure activity level specific to the foot and ankle. The purpose of this study was to develop a foot and ankle activity level scale (FAALS) instrument that will serve as an effective clinical tool for practitioners by assigning an activity level to patients.
Methods: This was a 4-phase study with 3 rounds of data collection (n = 1432).
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