Medicine unavailability, also known as stock-outs is a global problem. South Africa is not exempt from this problem which impacts negatively on the way in which healthcare services are rendered, more especially in the public sector. Communities are complaining about the unavailability of medicines at public health facilities particularly in primary health care clinics. In an effort to address this problem, the Minister of Health has declared medicine availability as one of the six priorities of the Department of Health. The aim of this study was to explore and describe the experiences and perceptions of healthcare professionals practicing at primary healthcare clinics in a peri-urban area of the Eastern Cape regarding the unavailability of medicines. Understanding the experiences and perceptions was expected to assist in addressing the problem at hand and help management in developing ways to address the problem and support the employees. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with healthcare professionals working at primary health care clinics in and around Mdantsane Township in the Eastern Cape. The main findings of the study can be divided into the following topics: perceived causes of medicine stock-outs, the implications of stock shortages, actions taken in the case of stock-outs and the role to play by in mitigating the impact of stock shortages. The limitations of the study include the research sample which was not truly representative of all healthcare professionals working at Mdantsane sub-district primary healthcare clinics. The study recommends various strategies that management should follow to assist in addressing medicine shortages. The researcher recommends further research to describe the experiences of healthcare professional regarding medicine unavailability.

This study aimed to investigate the role of the interpreter in medical communication in the Eastern Cape. This role was found to be a complex and varied one. Interpreters do not only change the words of one language into equivalent words in the other language, but act as advisers, explainers, cultural mediators, supervisors and advocates of the patient. In order to fulfil these functions, they communicate independently within the medical consultation and do not merely interpret what has been said by each participant. Rather, they tailor the message to the participants and the situation by adding to the message, omitting parts of it and changing it where necessary. This does not happen in an arbitrary fashion, but is subject to influence from a number of non-linguistic and linguistic contextual factors. These factors are discussed in this study and included in a suggested model of the interpreted medical consultation, which differs from other models of interpreting which were found to be more adequate for the-situation of conference interpreting than for community interpreting, of which medical interpreting is an example. Data was collected from interviews with interpreters and patients apd from interviews and questionnaires given to medical professionals. The results suggest that using trained medical interpreters in the interpreted medical consultation may solve some of the problems that arise and medical professienals should be encouraged to, learn the languages of their patients to alleviate some of the misunderstanding which occurs. The study also raises questions about the way in which we view interpreting and shows that community interpreting does not always observe the ideals envisaged by theories of interpreting.

M.Tech. / Objective: Translation and validation of the Afrikaans version of the Roland Morris Disability Questionnaire and the Oswestry Disability Index. Methods: The English questionnaires were translated into Afrikaans. The translations were then scrutinized by a focus group in order to determine its face validity. After face validity was established, the content validity was determined by two subject experts. Both the original and the translated versions of the questionnaires were given to a study group to complete on two separate occasions. The results from the study group were then put through various psychometric evaluations in order to determine its concurrent validity and reliability. Results: Results indicated that the Oswestry Disability Index had a significant level of reliability (α=0.830) and although the reliability of the Roland Morris Disability Questionnaire was below a significant level (α<0.7) it was still deemed reliable as it corresponded with its English counterpart. Both the Roland Morris Disability Questionnaire and Oswestry Disability Index indicated significant levels of concurrent validity; however the Roland Morris Disability Questionnaire seemed to have a higher level of concurrent validity. Conclusion: Both the Roland Morris Disability Questionnaire and the Oswestry Disability Index were translated successfully and can now be used within the Afrikaans population as an alternative to the English versions. Low back pain is a very common medical problem with a great impact on a patient’s health and quality of life. According to a review conducted by Papageorgiou et al. (1995), 60-80% of the general world population will suffer from low back pain in some stage of their life. In South Africa, De Wet, Losco and Moodley (2003) conducted a study on the incidence and prevalence of low back pain on 355 ABSA Bank and Unibank employees. The results of the study showed that the lifetime incidence of low back pain was 63%, the 6 month prevalence of LBP was 41% and the point prevalence of LBP was 9.6%. Treatment was sought by 46.94% of the sample population primarily from pharmacies, chiropractors, medical doctors, and physiotherapists. In addition, the study also showed that this condition is costing the South African economy millions each year due to lost working days as a result of absenteeism. As a result, disability questionnaires are increasingly used for clinical assessment, outcome measurement of treatment of low back pain. However, the use in different cultural groups has led to the need for the translation and the cross-cultural adaptation of these questionnaires to aid practitioners in the accurate assessment of low back pain.

Zoonotic diseases are diseases that are transmitted from animals or vectors to humans and vice versa. The public together with veterinarian authorities should readily access disease information as it is vital in rapidly controlling resultant zoonotic outbreak threats through improved awareness. Currently, the reporting of disease information in South Africa is predominantly limited to traditional methods of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) like faxes, monthly newspaper reports, radios, phones and televisions. Although these are effective ways of communication, their disadvantage is that the information that most of them offer can only be accessed at specific times during a crisis. New technologies like the internet have become the most efficient way of distributing information in near-real-time. Many developed countries have used web-based reporting platforms to deliver timely information through temporal and geographic visualisation techniques. There has been an attempt in the use of web-based reporting in South Africa but most of these sites are characterised by heavy text which makes them time consuming to use or maintain. As a result most sites have not been updated or have ceased to exist because of the work load involved. The success of web reporting mechanisms in developed countries offers evidence that web-based reporting systems when appropriately visualised can improve the easy understanding of information and efficiency in the analysis of that data. In this thesis, a web-based reporting prototype was proposed after gathering information from different sources: literature related to disease reporting and the visualisation of infectious diseases; the exploration of the currently deployed web systems; and the investigation of user requirements from relevant parties. The proposed prototype system was then developed using Adobe Flash tools, Java and MySQL languages. A focus group then reviewed the developed system to ascertain that the relevant requirements had been incorporated and to obtain additional ideas about the system. This led to the proposal of a new prototype system that can be used by the authorities concerned as a plan to develop a fully functional disease reporting system for South Africa.

Grounded in the social constructivism tradition, this study examined the role of communication in the glocalization and acculturation of HIV/AIDS by a section of sexually active Ugandans then living in Rakai district during the advent of the epidemic in 1982. Sixty-four women and men participated in ten focus group discussions in Rakai and Kampala districts. Five themes emerged from the data highlighting how individuals and communities made sense of the epidemic, the omnipresence of death, how they understood the HIV/AIDS campaign, and how they are currently coping with its backlash. The study concludes that HIV/AIDS is socially constructed and can be understood better from local perspectives rather than from a globalized view. The study emphasizes the integration of cultural idiosyncrasies in any health communication campaigns to realize behavioral change.

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document / Dissertation (MA (Publishing))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Information Science / unrestricted

It is widely acknowledged that patients' emotional expressions and doctors' empathic responses play a key role in providing satisfactory healthcare services and improving doctor-patient relationships. While such affective aspect of medical consultation discourse has been studied in different fields of research with the focus of examining medical consultations that occur in face-to-face settings, this area is extremely under-researched in the field of linguistics, particularly in the non-western context and the online space. While online medical consultation (OMC) has ushered in the new era of e-communication around the beginning of this century, discourse-related research on OMC is still in its infancy and studies on the affective dimension of the OMC discourse in non-western sites are, to my best knowledge, apparently absent in the literature. As China has seen a significant increase in the use of OMC platforms, studying OMC discourse in the China context is not only important but vital. With the support of the Chinese government's "Internet Plus Healthcare" policy issued in 2018, the reliance on the online mode of medical consultation will be further strengthened and the future of OMC service in China will remain promising. In order to have a better understanding of the affective aspect of OMC discourse, this thesis explores the online interaction between doctors and e-patients (including patients' caregivers) from a poststructuralist discourse analysis perspective. The data for this study consists of 300 text-based one-to-one instant messaging OMC cases collected from three popular OMC websites used in China. Each OMC case contains e-patients' emotional expression and doctors' empathic response. The data are analysed by the approach of computer-mediated discourse analysis in terms of two dimensions: the textual dimension and the social practice dimension. At the textual level, the study identifies indirect negative emotional acts by e-patients and empathic acts by doctors (which constitute the affective practice); it also examines the interactional discursive features involved in the affective practice. At the social practice level, it explores the discursive positions of e-patients and doctors within the affective practice context and the power relations that are reflected in the identity positionings. This study finds that the text-based OMC affective practice is rich in various types of emotional expressions and different ways of manifesting empathy, some of which are not mentioned in studies on medial consultation discourse. The study also identifies positions that disrupt the traditional or stereotypical roles of doctor and patient. Besides, it presents dynamic power relations, which problematizes the idea that doctors are always the more powerful party and patients are always powerless in medical encounters. This study sheds light on the importance of examining the affective facet of medical consultation from a discourse analytic perspective, when it comes to identifying non-traditional positions and power relations in clinical communication. The study also provides the implication that e-healthcare platforms, especially those with an e-commercialised model for healthcare services, have potential to produce a type of neo-liberal discourse - the e-commercialised medical consultation discourse - in which patients and caregivers, who are acknowledged as the less powerful group in the traditional healthcare activities, are empowered and privileged

It is widely acknowledged that patients' emotional expressions and doctors' empathic responses play a key role in providing satisfactory healthcare services and improving doctor-patient relationships. While such affective aspect of medical consultation discourse has been studied in different fields of research with the focus of examining medical consultations that occur in face-to-face settings, this area is extremely under-researched in the field of linguistics, particularly in the non-western context and the online space. While online medical consultation (OMC) has ushered in the new era of e-communication around the beginning of this century, discourse-related research on OMC is still in its infancy and studies on the affective dimension of the OMC discourse in non-western sites are, to my best knowledge, apparently absent in the literature. As China has seen a significant increase in the use of OMC platforms, studying OMC discourse in the China context is not only important but vital. With the support of the Chinese government's "Internet Plus Healthcare" policy issued in 2018, the reliance on the online mode of medical consultation will be further strengthened and the future of OMC service in China will remain promising. In order to have a better understanding of the affective aspect of OMC discourse, this thesis explores the online interaction between doctors and e-patients (including patients' caregivers) from a poststructuralist discourse analysis perspective. The data for this study consists of 300 text-based one-to-one instant messaging OMC cases collected from three popular OMC websites used in China. Each OMC case contains e-patients' emotional expression and doctors' empathic response. The data are analysed by the approach of computer-mediated discourse analysis in terms of two dimensions: the textual dimension and the social practice dimension. At the textual level, the study identifies indirect negative emotional acts by e-patients and empathic acts by doctors (which constitute the affective practice); it also examines the interactional discursive features involved in the affective practice. At the social practice level, it explores the discursive positions of e-patients and doctors within the affective practice context and the power relations that are reflected in the identity positionings. This study finds that the text-based OMC affective practice is rich in various types of emotional expressions and different ways of manifesting empathy, some of which are not mentioned in studies on medial consultation discourse. The study also identifies positions that disrupt the traditional or stereotypical roles of doctor and patient. Besides, it presents dynamic power relations, which problematizes the idea that doctors are always the more powerful party and patients are always powerless in medical encounters. This study sheds light on the importance of examining the affective facet of medical consultation from a discourse analytic perspective, when it comes to identifying non-traditional positions and power relations in clinical communication. The study also provides the implication that e-healthcare platforms, especially those with an e-commercialised model for healthcare services, have potential to produce a type of neo-liberal discourse - the e-commercialised medical consultation discourse - in which patients and caregivers, who are acknowledged as the less powerful group in the traditional healthcare activities, are empowered and privileged

Patient dissatisfaction with the physician/patient relationship and medical care is well documented in both the lay press and the medical literature. This problem appears to stem from communication between physician and patient and is drawing increased attention from the communication discipline. Research conducted in interpersonal communication satisfaction theory provides a basis for this study of patient satisfaction with physician/patient communication and its relationship to the perceived quality of medical care. This paper reports two sets of interviews with a total of 108 respondents on the topic of physician/patient communication which resulted in the identification of nine salient issues which appeared to contribute strongly to patient communication satisfaction. These issues are explained in terms of three areas of communication theory: control, empathy and confirmation.

This study was conducted to serve as a follow-up of services received and/or needed by families with children who have been identified by Crippled Children’s Division of the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center as having porencephaly, usually a severe form of brain damage. Porencephaly refers to cystic cavities or lesions in the brain caused by a prenatal insult to the brain resulting in varying degrees of motor and mental deficits. These children have been seen in general as part of the Cerebral Palsy Clinic. There may be a lack of awareness on part of the parents and the staff as to what the precise diagnosis and probable prognosis is of this group, therefore, it seemed appropriate to look at specific problems and needs that families might have. In addition, the information gathered could be useful in planning a specialized clinic for this population.