Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1974. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, December 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Technische Universität, Dresden, 2004. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. [329]-357).

Thesis (Ph. D. in Psychology)--Vanderbilt University, Dec. 2006. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.P.H.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006.

Thesis (M.P.H.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 289-337).

On September 8 2000, world leaders gathered at the United Nations summit and resolved to help citizens in the world's poorest countries to achieve a better life by the year 2015. This resolve was outlined in the Millennium Development Goals that were subsequently published with goals 4, 5 and 6 specific to healthcare. The integration of ICT‘s in the remote delivery of services has opened new avenues from which centralised, scarce resources can be accessed remotely for the benefit of the general population. Telemedicine has made great strides in the developed world with remote populations benefiting from the improved access to healthcare. In the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, the sub-field of teleradiology has shown promise for enabling the wider delivery of specialist services. However, in resource constrained settings such as developing countries, telemedicine has had limited success and as a result, the equitable access to healthcare for remote populations remains inconceivable. This is exacerbated by the migration of healthcare professionals both domestically and internationally. The public sector has suffered the most with acute staff shortages in the public healthcare institutions, more so in rural and remote areas. This study identifies the prevailing challenges posing as barriers to the effective use of telemedicine services in the Public health sector in resource constrained settings and provides recommendations and guidelines aimed at facilitating the adoption and effective use of telemedicine. Challenges are identified from literature and from the first person accounts of specific role-players who are directly involved with telemedicine in their respective institutions. Participants are drawn from institutions offering telemedicine services within the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Challenges identified from literature are collated with those identified from the participant interviews to provide a concise list of factors that is used as input to the recommendation and guideline development process. The results thus far point to an enthusiastic environment coupled with a semi-capable infrastructure but however hampered by staff shortages and a general lack of support structures and propulsion mechanisms to adequately encourage the wider use of telemedicine. The proposed guidelines aim to address the challenges at the different role-player levels.

The primary health care (PHC) model is being actively promoted as an effective and lower-cost alternative to conventional health care delivery systems in many developing countries. Despite the fact that over 300 PHC projects of varying scale have been implemented and reported on throughout the Third World over the past two decades, there appears to be little evidence available to support the popular hypothesis that the availability and utilization of primary health care services necessarily results in significant improvements in health. The objective of this thesis is to identify alternative strategies for evaluating PHC projects which will establish credible and useful results. The thesis reviews the evolution of both the PHC model and evaluative research methodologies, and then presents a critical analysis of a set of PHC project evaluations. The aim of this exercise is to identify some of the major factors which have limited the validity, utility and significance of the evaluation results. The thesis suggests that less rigorous evaluative research designs and evaluative techniques which use a combination of quantitative and qualitative data be used to enhance the credibility and utility of evaluation results. / Medicine, Faculty of / Population and Public Health (SPPH), School of / Graduate

The approach of this enquiry is to describe and analyze the processes and interactions which occur when Indo-Fijian women seek health care from their medical system made up of traditional beliefs and practices, combined with alternative sources of healing such as the Biomedical system, and some Fijian practices. Throughout, I have been concerned with discovering the strategic choices and decisions which Indo-Fijians employ in their transactions with a number of traditional types of healers such as pandits, pujaris, maulvis, orjahs and dais, as well as doctors and nurses in the biomedical sector. I have used the concept of process as basic to this enquiry and I have paid attention to those processes which display social behaviour in empirical events or situations, and thus on emergent medical systems. Thus, the approach chosen for this study is particularly suitable in the case of Indo-Fijians who arrived in Fiji as indentured labourers, and have had to adapt, to regularize their lives through situational adjustment. The methods used for data collection were participant-observation in two Indo-Fijian settlements and in a Western Biomedical hospital, in health centres and district nursing stations; as well as the use of archival and library materials. The enquiry, the first of its kind on health strategies of Indo-Fijian women, concludes with a chapter which discusses the interactions and processes between all medical care domains used by Indo-Fijians. Indo-Fijians do not distinguish between medical systems; their medical system Is Indian in its ideology but lacks the practice of the therapies of professionalized Indian medical systems; it has retained religious healing, reconstructed and synthesized folk healing traditions from many parts of India, as well as adding elements from Fijian healing. While it is also Western in its use of professional therapies, it lacks the ideological foundations of biomedicine. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate