An innovation to improve health outcomes in Amajuba district,KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

Systems’ thinking places high value on understanding the context. This study focused on the collection of disaggregated data in order to understand the context, to facilitate improvement of health outcomes. The aim of this article was to assess the implementation of municipal ward-based health data collection (disaggregated data) and health care workers’ perceptions of this data collection process. This cross-sectional study used mixed methods in Amajuba district. The participants were professional nurses at the Primary Health Care level. Of the 131 respondents, 123 (93.9%) collected municipal ward-based health data, and found it useful. Opportunities for improving data collection were identified. Disaggregation of the data at ward level contributes to a better understanding of the target population’s health, assists planning for health needs and enables provision of targeted interventions in order to improve health outcomes, to prevent financial regression and waste of health resources.     

Health screening strategies for international air travelers during an epidemic or pandemic

Air travelers can carry an infectious disease's pathogenic microorganism in their bodies and spread the disease from one country to another in a few days. To delay the spread, health screening stations may be set up at airport terminals to screen travelers. This research tested three different health screening strategies, each with a different combination of screening stations at trip origins, destinations and connecting airports. Discrete event simulations were performed, based on the 2014 to 2016 Ebola virus epidemic, with special focus on travelers from the West African countries traveling to the United States, including travelers who transferred flights at airports in European Union member states. The effectiveness of the screening strategies was analyzed in terms of correct detection, missed detection and false alarm rate. The results showed that exit screening at trip origins brought big improvements in the performance measurements compared to no screening. However, additional screening at the destinations and connecting airports contributed marginal benefits.     

Policy induced increases in private healthcare financing provide short-term relief of total healthcare expenditure growth: Evidence from OECD countries

Healthcare reforms have long been advocated as a cure to the increasing healthcare expenditures in advanced economies. Nevertheless, it has not been established whether a market solution via private financing, rather than public financing, curb aggregate healthcare expenditures. To our knowledge, this paper is the first that quantifies the impact of reforms that significantly increases (decreases) the private (public) share of healthcare financing on total healthcare expenditures relative to income in 20 OECD countries. Our reform measure is based on structural break testing of the private share of total expenditures, and verification using evidence of policy reforms. To quantify the effect of these reforms we apply Propensity Score Matching and Inverse Probability Weighted regression analysis. Over a 5-year evaluation period the reforms lead to an accumulated cost saving 0.45 percentage points of GDP. The yearly effects of the reforms are largest in the first years in the post-reform period and decreases in size as a function of time since the reform. Our findings suggest that the investigated healthcare reforms have a relatively short-lived effect on aggregate health spending relative to GDP. The findings are robust to various sensitivity tests.     

谈体育教学改革发展趋势

体育教学“以人为本”观念形成的社会环境是现代化发展的必然结果。我们教育改革思路提出“健康第一”的指导思想，同样验证了“以人为本”的现代体育观念的社会环境背景。学生对体育课的要求和看法将对体育教学改革提供“主体”依据，体育教学改革要“以人为本”。     

A note on “Bed allocation techniques based on census data”

Capacity planning and resource allocation are crucial to the cost-effective delivery of health care services. In this paper, we present an analytic approach based on a modified version of the Holt-Winters multiplicative seasonality forecasting model to determine the frequency distribution associated with a hospital care unit's census. This paper is a follow-up to the census frequency distribution simulation model described in Lapierre et al. (Socio Econ. Plan. Sci. 33 (1999) 25). We demonstrate that our model can provide census frequency distributions equivalent to the simulation model of Lapierre et al. [1], but without the computational effort common to simulation models.     

关于商务谈判需要的探析

需要是商务谈判的基础。根据马斯洛的层次需要理论 ,商务谈判也有相应的表现。作为一种特殊的需要 ,商务谈判具有隐饰性和二元性的特征。了解商务谈判需要 ,对于指导谈判和进行科学的谈判人力资源管理都有积极意义     

Medical insurance with rank-dependent utility

Summary. A well-known result in the medical insurance literature is that zero co-insurance is never second-best for insurance contracts subject to moral hazard. We replace the usual expected utility assumption with a version of the rank-dependent utility (RDU) model that has greater experimental support. When consumers exhibit such preferences, we show that zero co-insurance may in fact be optimal, especially for low-risk consumers. Indeed, it is even possible that the first-best and second-best contracts are identical. In this case, there is no “market failure”, despite the informational asymmetry. We argue that these RDU results are in better accord with the empirical evidence from US health insurance markets. Received: February 26, 2001; revised version: October 4, 2002 RID="*" ID="*"The authors would particularly like to thank Simon Grant, John Quiggin, Peter Wakker and an anonymous referee for valuable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. The paper has also benefitted from the input of seminar audiences at The Australian National University, University of Auckland, University of Melbourne and University of Sydney. Ryan also gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the ARC, through Grant number A000000055. Correspondence to:R. Vaithianathan     

生态需要与发展的理论研究

生态需要是人类三大需要的支柱之一，也是人类持久发展的动力源。正是人类的生态需要导致了人类发展观念的五种更新，促进人类需要结构的合理化，推动人类社会整体前进。     

Biological Adaptation in Human Societies: a ‘Basic Needs’ Approach

The groundzero premise (so to speak) of the biological sciences is that survival and reproduction is the basic, continuing, inescapable problem for all living organisms; life is at bottom a survival enterprise. It follows that survival is the paradigmatic problem for human societies as well; it is a prerequisite for any other, more exalted objectives. Although the term adaptation is also familiar to social scientists, until recently it has been used only selectively, and often very imprecisely. Here a more rigorous and systematic approach to the concept of adaptation is proposed in terms of basic needs. The concept of basic human needs has a venerable history – tracing back at least to Plato and Aristotle. Yet the development of a formal theory of basic needs has lagged far behind. The reason is that the concept of objective, measurable needs is inconsistent with the theoretical assumptions that have dominated economic and social theory for most of this century, namely, valuerelativism and cultural determinism. Nevertheless, there have been a number of efforts over the past 30 years to develop more universalistic criteria for basic needs, both for use in monitoring social wellbeing (social indicators) and for public policy formulation. Here I will advance a strictly biological approach to perationalizing the concept of basic needs. It is argued that much of our economic and social life (and the motivations behind our revealed preferences and subjective utility assessments), not to mention the actions of modern governments, are either directly or indirectly related to the meeting of our basic survival needs. Furthermore, these needs can be specified to a first approximation and supported empirically to varying degrees, with the obvious caveat that there are major individual and contextual variations in their application. Equally important, complex human societies generate an array of instrumental needs which, as the term implies, serve as intermediaries between our primary needs and the specific economic, cultural and political contexts within which these needs must be satisfied. An explicit framework of Survival Indicators, including a profile of Personal Fitness and an aggregate index of Population Fitness, is briefly elucidated. Finally, it is suggested that a basic needs paradigm could provide an analytical tool (a biologic) for examining more closely the relationship between our social, economic and political behaviors and institutions and their survival consequences, as well as providing a predictive tool of some value.     

Does the World Bank have any impact on human development of the poorest countries? Some preliminary evidence from Africa

In an attempt to better understand the impact of the World Bank on human development in poor countries, we use cross-country data on African countries for the 1990–2002 period to examine this relationship. The coefficient estimates of our parsimonious fixed-effects models indicate that while loans and grants of the Bank have had a positive impact on some relatively short-term indicators of health and education in an average African country, there is little evidence to suggest that such loans and grants have helped these countries to consolidate on the short-term gains.