Articles: community-health-services.
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Global public health · May 2018
Community-based reports of morbidity, mortality, and health-seeking behaviours in four Monrovia communities during the West African Ebola epidemic.
The goal of this study was to assess morbidity, mortality, and health-seeking behaviours during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Monrovia, Liberia. This study examined commonly reported symptoms of illness, pre-clinical diagnostic practices, typical healthcare-seeking strategies, and health resources available to populations, in order to identify salient needs and gaps in healthcare that would inform local emergency response efforts. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with household members in four Monrovia neighbourhoods. ⋯ Findings suggest that non-formal healthcare systems played an important role in managing morbidity during the West African Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak. Lay community members engaged in complex assessments of health symptoms and sought biomedical care at rates perhaps higher than anticipated during the response. This study highlights how informal networks of healthcare providers can play an important role in preventing and curbing future emerging disease outbreaks.
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Objective Frequent attendance by people to an emergency department (ED) is a global concern. A collaborative partnership between an ED and the primary and community healthcare sectors has the potential to improve care for the person who frequently attends the ED. The aims of the Working Together to Connect Care program are to decrease the number of presentations by providing focused community support and to integrate all healthcare services with the goal of achieving positive, patient-centred and directed outcomes. ⋯ Aggressive and assertive outreach, intense coordination of services by integrated care teams, and the need for non-medical resources, such as supportive housing, have positive outcomes for this group of people. What does this paper add? This study uses international research findings in an Australian setting to provide a testing of the generalisability of an assertive and collaborative ED and community case management approach for supporting people who frequent a metropolitan ED. What are the implications for practitioners? The chronicling of a process undertaken to affect change in a health care setting supports practitioners when developing processes for this cohort across different ED contexts.
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Aust J Rural Health · Apr 2018
Service-learning partnerships: Features that promote transformational and sustainable rural and remote health partnerships and services.
To describe features that promote transformational and sustainable community engaged health partnerships and services in rural and remote Australian locations. ⋯ We propose that these features contributed to the transformational engagement of community and university participants. These features can inform health sector approaches to community engagement, enhancing rural and remote service accessibility, acceptability, and sustainability outcomes.
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The Indigenous people of Canada include First Nations, Inuit and Metis. This research focused on four diverse First Nations communities located in Ontario and Manitoba. First Nations communities have well-established culturally-based social processes for supporting their community members experiencing dying, loss, grief and bereavement. However, communities do not have formalized local palliative care (PC) programs and have limited access to medical services, especially pain and symptom management. ⋯ This research provides a Canadian example of implementing a public health approach to PC in an Indigenous context using PAR. It provides evidence of the effectiveness of a community capacity development as a strategy and illustrates how to implement it. This approach, fully grounded in local culture and context, has potential to be adapted to Indigenous communities elsewhere in Canada and internationally.