1,720,960 research outputs found
Exploring factors motivating health workers to choose and maintain a career in rural health practice in South Africa
No full textIncludes bibliographical references (leaves 159-168).The South African National Department of Health (NDoH) has committed itself to ensure that there is equity in the distribution of health workers especially to rural areas primarily through service requirements and incentives. Despite all initiatives put in place, the national health system struggles to recruit and retain health workers in rural health system struggles to recruit and retain health workers in rural health facilities. While the majority of health workers choose to practise in urban areas, some choose to pursue and persist in a career in rural health practice. This study determines, in the South African context, factors that motivate health workers to choose and maintain a career in rural health practice. It establishes what makes health workers choose to work in rural areas, what encourages them to stay in rural health practice and what tempts them to leave rural health practice. These factors interact at different levels, at the level of an individual health worker, of a rural health organisation or level of a rural community, to influence the decision of a health worker to choose, stay in or leave rural health pratice. The study combines both quantitative and qualitative methods in a cross-sectional survey to identify these factors from the perspective of rural health workers. It invites rural health workers to identify those factors that are applicable to them from the list of factors and rank them according to the degree of importance in their decision-making. A self-administered structured questionnaire and key informant interviews were used to collect data. The findings of this study show that rural background, desire to gain work experience, family obligations, prior interest in underserved area practice, desire or requirement to perform community service, desire to live in a rural area, family friendly enviornment and having friends living in a rural area are very important factors motivating health workers to choose a career in rural health practice
Technical Capacity Reinforcement of the Oncology Unit at Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital: Impact on Access and Quality of Cancer Care
No full textA research report submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Public Health, in the Faculty of Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024Background: Rural and remote areas suffer from inadequate resources for healthcare, including cancer care. In the bid to improve access to and quality of cancer care, the South African government initiated a policy of decentralising cancer care services. This study aimed to appraise the impact of technical capacity reinforcement on access to and quality of cancer care services provided at Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital (NMAH) in South Africa’s Eastern Cape (EC) province. Methodology: A concurrent mixed-methods study design through which a descriptive, quantitative cross-sectional design and in-depth, semi-structured interviews were adopted. The cross-sectional design served to describe cancer prevalence among patients attending NMAH, while the in-depth interviews explored patients’ experiences with access and care quality before and after decentralisation. The statistical software analysis package Epi Info version 7.2.5.0 and the Advance Excel statistical analysis package version 2306 were used for the statistical analysis of quantitative data. While analysis of qualitative data was performed using the Robert codebook interpretation framework. Results: Of the 120 randomly sampled participants for the quantitative study, 122 types of cancer were recorded. A total of 80.8% (n = 97/120) participants were female, and 94.2% (n = 113/120) were unemployed. Patients’ ages ranged from 10 to 93 years, with a median age of 52 years (25th percentile: 42 years, 75th percentile: 67 years). Cervical and breast cancers were prevalent in 25.4% (n = 31/122; 95% Confidence Interval (95%CI): 0.2-0.3) and 23.0% (n = 28/122; with 95%CI: 0.2-0.4) of sampled records, respectively. The qualitative investigation enabled exploration of five main themes: cancer care context in the province, cancer care continuum at primary care services, cancer's emotional toll and social experiences, unequal paths to healing: services before decentralisation, decentralization: perceptions of accessibility and quality in care and twelve sub-themes. Of the twenty interviewed participants, fourteen had cervical cancer. Participants reported that the change to NMAH as the point of care for chemotherapy, had improved access with significant financial relief for patients while maintaining a high standard of care. Conclusion: Despite the current gap in cancer care services, available decentralise services provided at NMAH in the EC province are of high standard. Notwithstanding the improved accessibility, the provision to include radiotherapy will enhance services offered at this health facility.MM202
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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