Towards universal health coverage: Exploring the determinants of household enrolment into National Health Insurance in the Kassena Nankana District, Ghana

This study investigates the determinants of household participation in National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) in the Kassena-Nankana District in Ghana. In order to achieve this purpose, a cross-sectional survey was used to collect data from 417 randomly selected household heads. The results established that the NHIS is making incremental progress towards achieving universal health coverage because majority (67%) of the sampled population was enrolled in the NHIS. However, further analysis of the data highlighted both the challenge of achieving equity of participation in health insurance and the yawning financial barriers to accessing health care for poor households and those employed in the informal sector. For example, majority (77%) of uninsured households indicated that they were not enrolled in the NHIS because they could not afford the cost of insurance premiums. The research findings showed that income, socio-economic status (SES), formal employment, educational status, and gender amongst others, significantly determine household enrolment in health insurance. In order to increase the enrolment of the poor in the NHIS, and of achieving universal health coverage, the authors recommend that the government considers using payroll deductions to finance the health care needs of all formal sector employees while financing the health care of the rest of the population using tax revenues. It is also recommeded that the NHIS considers making the payment of insurance premium flexible, such as allowing housholds to pay in installments or in kind.International Bibliography of Social Science

Making programme learning outcomes explicit for students of process and chemical engineering

There is a global shift from solely content-driven teaching to learning outcomes driven engineering education which underpins much of the educational reform. In engineering education, degree programme learning outcomes are more commonplace as more and more professional accrediting bodies require fulfilment or compliance with prescribed learning outcomes. However, the students may not be presented with these learning outcomes as they are often “hidden” in application for accreditation documentation and not divulged to the students. This is the context of this thesis study. Undergraduate students (2006-2008) taking the BE degree programme in Process & Chemical Engineering at UCC were first surveyed to assess their level of knowledge of the learning outcomes concept and of the degree programme learning outcomes. The contents of two application documents for accreditation documents submitted to professional accreditation bodies along with Institution guidelines were reviewed to formulate the degree programme learning outcomes and these were presented to the students. These students were then surveyed after the presentation. The results of the questionnaire demonstrated a major improvement in the knowledge of the learning outcomes concept and the degree programme learning outcomes amongst the students. It also showed that the students found the session to be beneficial

Ensnaring the Elusive Eodermdrome

We wish to introduce the recreational aspects of the eodermdrome, which is a recently formulated concept dealing with the structure of language units such as letters and words. Although this concept may eventually lead to a numerical way to compare the structural differences between languages and to trace structural development in a single language, the majority of individuals who learn about eodermdromes evince less interest in their potential scholarly ramifications than in the delightful task of creating them

Hogging-down corn---A successful practice

“Hogging-down” of corn is a practical and efficient method of gathering the crop and feeding the hogs. Farmers who have tried it are almost unanimously agreed that the method is economical and successful. The most enthusiastic “hogging-down” men are those who have followed the method longest. The animal husbandry section of the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station has in practical tests convincingly justified this faith of the practical men

CLASSnmat: A global night marine air temperature data set, 1880–2019

A new data set of Night Marine Air Temperature (NMAT) is presented that builds on the HadNMAT2 data set, which was released in 2013. In a similar manner to HadNMAT2, the new data set (CLASSnmat) provides uninterpolated, monthly global values at a 5° resolution back to 1880. In addition to being extended to the end of 2019, four main developments are made in CLASSnmat: (1) the NMAT values are extracted from the most recent version of the International Comprehensive Ocean‐Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS Release 3) and a revised method of eliminating duplicated observations is used; (2) values of NMAT are adjusted to 2m and 20m heights in addition to the 10 m height used in HadNMAT2; (3) a refinement is made to the corrections necessary during World War 2, which uses more of the NMAT observations and hence results in a more extensive spatial coverage for this period than was possible in HadNMAT2; (4) an updated gridding method is used that allows for an improved propagation of uncertainty from the individual NMAT values through to the gridded estimates. In this paper, the method used to construct CLASSnmat (version 1.0.0.0) is described

An improved Bank Credit Scoring Model A Naïve Bayesian Approach

Credit scoring is a decision tool used by organizations to grant or reject credit requests from their customers. Series of artificial intelligent and traditional approaches have been used to building credit scoring model and credit risk evaluation. Despite being ranked amongst the top 10 algorithm in Data mining, Naïve Bayesian algorithm has not been extensively used in building credit score cards. Using demographic and material indicators as input variables, this paper investigate the ability of Bayesian classifier towards building credit scoring model in banking sector