scholarly journals The Utility of Rural and Underserved Designations in Geospatial Assessments of Distance Traveled to Healthcare Services: Implications for Public Health Research and Practice

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Lee Smith ◽  
Justin B. Dickerson ◽  
Monica L. Wendel ◽  
SangNam Ahn ◽  
Jairus C. Pulczinski ◽  
...  

Health disparities research in rural populations is based on several common taxonomies identified by geography and population density. However, little is known about the implications of different rurality definitions on public health outcomes. To help illuminate the meaning of different rural designations often used in research, service delivery, or policy reports, this study will (1) review the different definitions of rurality and their purposes; (2) identify the overlap of various rural designations in an eight-county Brazos Valley region in Central Texas; (3) describe participant characteristic profiles based on distances traveled to obtain healthcare services; and (4) examine common profile characteristics associated with each designation. Data were analyzed from a random sample from 1,958 Texas adults participating in a community assessment. K-means cluster analysis was used to identify natural groupings of individuals based on distance traveled to obtain three healthcare services: medical care, dental care, and prescription medication pick-up. Significant variation in cluster representation and resident characteristics was observed by rural designation. Given widely used taxonomies for designating areas as rural (or provider shortage) in health-related research, this study highlights differences that could influence research results and subsequent program and policy development based on rural designation.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-186
Author(s):  
Cornelia Geukes ◽  
Horst M. Müller

Measuring health may refer to the measurement of general health status through measures of physical function, pain, social health, psychological aspects, and specific disease. Almost no evidence is available on the possible interaction of physiological measures and correlating emotional–affective states that are triggered by dealing with individual health-relevant issues and their specific processing modes. Public health research has long been concerned with the processing of health-related information. However, it is not yet clear which factors influence access and the handling of health-related information in detail. One way to close this research gap could be adopting methods from neurocognitive experiments to add psychophysiological data to existing approaches in health-related research. In this article, we present some of these methods and give a narrative overview and description of their usefulness for enlarged research in public health.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Md Anwarul Azim Majumder ◽  
Sayeeda Rahman ◽  
Ahbab Mohammad Fazle Rabbi ◽  
Palash Das

South East Asia Journal of Public Health (SEAJPH) is a Bangladesh-origin, open access and peer reviewed international journal. This study conducted a bibliometric analysis of papers published in the SEAJPH from 2011 to 2015 using data extracted from the Bangladesh Journal Online database. Five volumes (which include eight issues) with a total of 108 papers were included in the analysis. The highest number of papers were published in 2012 and the average number of papers published per year was 21.6. More than 58% of published papers were original research, followed by short communications (12.96%).The highest proportion of papers were published during the study period by single authors (20.37%) or three authors (20.37%), followed by double authors (19.44%). he maximum of average authors/article was found to be 4 in the year 2011, and the minimum was 2.6 in the year 2015. The degree of collaboration in SEAJPH is approximately 0.80, and the collaboration was consistently high every year (ranges from 0.74 to 0.87). The maximum number of papers was published by professionals from India (35.16%), followed by Bangladesh (25%) and the UK (13.89%). Timely and accurate evidence-based information from health-related research/publications provide the extent and burden health problems/challenges of countries and regions. AS the SAARC region has the greatest total disease burden of any region in the world and relevant public health research and dissemination/collaboration of findings is crucial to alleviate this burden. The SEAJPH is successful in this regard. However, the journal needs indexing to popular search engines (e.g. PubMed) to attract global researchers and eventually lead to an increase in the citation of the papers.South East Asia Journal of Public Health Vol.5(1) 2015: 51-54


Author(s):  
Lawrence T. Brown ◽  
Ashley Bachelder ◽  
Marisela B. Gomez ◽  
Alicia Sherrell ◽  
Imani Bryan

Academic institutions are increasingly playing pivotal roles in economic development and community redevelopment in cities around the United States. Many are functioning in the role of anchor institutions and building technology, biotechnology, or research parks to facilitate biomedical research. In the process, universities often partner with local governments, implementing policies that displace entire communities and families, thereby inducing a type of trauma that researcher Mindy Thompson Fullilove has termed “root shock.” We argue that displacement is a threat to public health and explore the ethical implications of university-led displacement on public health research, especially the inclusion of vulnerable populations into health-related research. We further explicate how the legal system has sanctioned the exercise of eminent domain by private entities such as universities and developers.Strategies that communities have employed in order to counter such threats are highlighted and recommended for communities that may be under the threat of university-led displacement. We also offer a critical look at the three dominant assumptions underlying university-sponsored development: that research parks are engines of economic development, that deconcentrating poverty via displacement is effective, and that poverty is simply the lack of economic or financial means. Understanding these fallacies will help communities under the threat of university-sponsored displacement to protect community wealth, build power, and improve health.


2016 ◽  
pp. 1269-1282
Author(s):  
Keren Mazuz ◽  
Seema Biswas ◽  
Rui Amaral Mendes

With the expanding utilization of digital and technological media by public health providers and healthcare consumers, there is a need to evaluate the patients' role. There is good evidence of the growing acceptability of the Internet in seeking health information. This paper aims to evaluate the patients' role as an informed-patient. This role, albeit, with its limitations, affects the ways by which people consume health, consult their doctors and also influence health policy. This paper is a sociological and anthropological analysis of the effect of e-health services on the informed-patients' role and their ability to bring about social change through the Internet and their use of e-healthcare services. Through analyzing current literature and examples of health-related websites, this analysis focuses on informed-patients and how they are able to demand better health services for themselves and for their communities.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-67
Author(s):  
Keren Mazuz ◽  
Seema Biswas ◽  
Rui Amaral Mendes

With the expanding utilization of digital and technological media by public health providers and healthcare consumers, there is a need to evaluate the patients' role. There is good evidence of the growing acceptability of the Internet in seeking health information. This paper aims to evaluate the patients' role as an informed-patient. This role, albeit, with its limitations, affects the ways by which people consume health, consult their doctors and also influence health policy. This paper is a sociological and anthropological analysis of the effect of e-health services on the informed-patients' role and their ability to bring about social change through the Internet and their use of e-healthcare services. Through analyzing current literature and examples of health-related websites, this analysis focuses on informed-patients and how they are able to demand better health services for themselves and for their communities.


SAGE Open ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 215824402096277
Author(s):  
Leena Eklund Karlsson ◽  
Anne Leena Ikonen ◽  
Kothar Mohammed Alqahtani ◽  
Pernille Tanggaard Andersen ◽  
Subash Thapa

In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), no studies have been documented to analyze the equity aspects of public health policies. The aims of the study were to identify policy documents in the KSA relevant to public health and to explore whether these include an equity approach. Twenty health-related documents were identified from various ministries’ websites and analyzed through directed content analysis. The results showed that the term “equity” was neither defined nor explained in the documents and suggestions on how to tackle health inequities were lacking. None of the suggested measures communicated an explicit focus on promoting health equity or the social gradient. Several upstream, midstream, and downstream measures were suggested to improve justice and public health for the people. The study reveals that there is a need for an in-depth assessment of the policy measures across sectors and their influence on health equity to inform future health policy development and action in the KSA.


Author(s):  
Guangyu Hu ◽  
Xueyan Han ◽  
Huixuan Zhou ◽  
Yuanli Liu

Social media has been used as data resource in a growing number of health-related research. The objectives of this study were to identify content volume and sentiment polarity of social media records relevant to healthcare services in China. A list of the key words of healthcare services were used to extract data from WeChat and Qzone, between June 2017 and September 2017. The data were put into a corpus, where content analyses were performed using Tencent natural language processing (NLP). The final corpus contained approximately 29 million records. Records on patient safety were the most frequently mentioned topic (approximately 8.73 million, 30.1% of the corpus), with the contents on humanistic care having received the least social media references (0.43 Million, 1.5%). Sentiment analyses showed 36.1%, 16.4%, and 47.4% of positive, neutral, and negative emotions, respectively. The doctor-patient relationship category had the highest proportion of negative contents (74.9%), followed by service efficiency (59.5%), and nursing service (53.0%). Neutral disposition was found to be the highest (30.4%) in the contents on appointment-booking services. This study added evidence to the magnitude and direction of public perceptions on healthcare services in China’s hospital and pointed to the possibility of monitoring healthcare service improvement, using readily available data in social media.


Author(s):  
Vishwali Mhasawade ◽  
Anas Elghafari ◽  
Dustin T. Duncan ◽  
Rumi Chunara

Online social communities are becoming windows for learning more about the health of populations, through information about our health-related behaviors and outcomes from daily life. At the same time, just as public health data and theory has shown that aspects of the built environment can affect our health-related behaviors and outcomes, it is also possible that online social environments (e.g., posts and other attributes of our online social networks) can also shape facets of our life. Given the important role of the online environment in public health research and implications, factors which contribute to the generation of such data must be well understood. Here we study the role of the built and online social environments in the expression of dining on Instagram in Abu Dhabi; a ubiquitous social media platform, city with a vibrant dining culture, and a topic (food posts) which has been studied in relation to public health outcomes. Our study uses available data on user Instagram profiles and their Instagram networks, as well as the local food environment measured through the dining types (e.g., casual dining restaurants, food court restaurants, lounges etc.) by neighborhood. We find evidence that factors of the online social environment (profiles that post about dining versus profiles that do not post about dining) have different influences on the relationship between a user’s built environment and the social dining expression, with effects also varying by dining types in the environment and time of day. We examine the mechanism of the relationships via moderation and mediation analyses. Overall, this study provides evidence that the interplay of online and built environments depend on attributes of said environments and can also vary by time of day. We discuss implications of this synergy for precisely-targeting public health interventions, as well as on using online data for public health research.


BMJ Open ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. e022931 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Taylor ◽  
Claudia Pagliari

IntroductionThe rising popularity of social media, since their inception around 20 years ago, has been echoed in the growth of health-related research using data derived from them. This has created a demand for literature reviews to synthesise this emerging evidence base and inform future activities. Existing reviews tend to be narrow in scope, with limited consideration of the different types of data, analytical methods and ethical issues involved. There has also been a tendency for research to be siloed within different academic communities (eg, computer science, public health), hindering knowledge translation. To address these limitations, we will undertake a comprehensive scoping review, to systematically capture the broad corpus of published, health-related research based on social media data. Here, we present the review protocol and the pilot analyses used to inform it.MethodsA version of Arksey and O’Malley’s five-stage scoping review framework will be followed: (1) identifying the research question; (2) identifying the relevant literature; (3) selecting the studies; (4) charting the data and (5) collating, summarising and reporting the results. To inform the search strategy, we developed an inclusive list of keyword combinations related to social media, health and relevant methodologies. The frequency and variability of terms were charted over time and cross referenced with significant events, such as the advent of Twitter. Five leading health, informatics, business and cross-disciplinary databases will be searched: PubMed, Scopus, Association of Computer Machinery, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts, alongside the Google search engine. There will be no restriction by date.Ethics and disseminationThe review focuses on published research in the public domain therefore no ethics approval is required. The completed review will be submitted for publication to a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary open access journal, and conferences on public health and digital research.


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