Hospitals in the Indian state of Rajasthan will be assessed next month to gauge whether upgrades, paid for with a new international innovative financing model, have brought them up to the new government quality standards. At least 92 small private healthcare organisations (SHCOs) - small private rural and urban hospitals - are being upgraded this year, and 360 in total over three years. If they manage to improve, 600,000 pregnant women would have improved care during delivery and potentially save the lives of up to 10,000 women and newborns over five years, according to one of the funders, the US government’s donor arm, USAID. The innovative financing model, called a development impact bond, has been put together by a consortium of philanthropic, NGOs, private organisations with USAID. But importantly, according to Priya Sharma, senior policy and innovative financing adviser at USAID, the model is advantageous for funders – whether they be governments or donors - wanting to make improvements with better outcomes. Continue reading ->
Or they should be. That’s the conclusion of a recent study published in the medical journal Vaccine. The study focused on political views of parents in the state of California, who had chosen not to vaccinate their nursery-school aged children. And it tracked the number of parents who had filed personal belief exemptions (PBEs), applications for permission to avoid vaccinations over a 5-year period to 2015. A disproportionate number of parents filing such forms were from Republican or conservative neighbourhoods, according to researcher Kevin A Estep, from the health administration and policy program at the university. Continue reading ->
Hidden amongst the thousands of Facebook pages given over to holiday snaps and gossip are groups of patients who have hepatitis C, a disease that affects more than 70 million worldwide and kills around 400,000 people a year. But importantly, these groups of patients from Russia to Australia have got together to help each other import a relatively new class of drug that is able to cure most of the patients who take it. Continue reading ->
Cardiovascular diseases (CVD), a group of conditions that can result in heart attacks and strokes, is the world’s number one killer, accounting for one-third of deaths throughout the world, according to research released recently (17 May) by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. Continue reading ->