Expanded Quality Management Using Information Power (EQUIP): Protocol for a Quasi-experimental Study to Improve Maternal and Newborn Health in Tanzania and Uganda.

Maternal and newborn mortality remain unacceptably high in sub-Saharan Africa. Tanzania and Uganda are committed to reduce maternal and newborn mortality, but progress has been limited and many essential interventions are unavailable in primary and referral facilities. Quality management has the potential to overcome low implementation levels by assisting teams of health workers and others finding local solutions to problems in delivering quality care and the underutilization of health services by the community. Existing evidence of the effect of quality management on health worker performance in these contexts has important limitations, and the feasibility of expanding quality management to the community level is unknown. We aim to assess quality management at the district, facility, and community levels, supported by information from high-quality, continuous surveys, and report effects of the quality management intervention on the utilization and quality of services in Tanzania and Uganda. In Uganda and Tanzania, the Expanded Quality Management Using Information Power (EQUIP) intervention is implemented in one intervention district and evaluated using a plausibility design with one non-randomly selected comparison district. The quality management approach is based on the collaborative model for improvement, in which groups of quality improvement teams test new implementation strategies (change ideas) and periodically meet to share results and identify the best strategies. The teams use locally-generated community and health facility data to monitor improvements. In addition, data from continuous health facility and household surveys are used to guide prioritization and decision making by quality improvement teams as well as for evaluation of the intervention. These data include input, process, output, coverage, implementation practice, and client satisfaction indicators in both intervention and comparison districts. Thus, intervention districts receive quality management and continuous surveys, and comparison districts-only continuous surveys. EQUIP is a district-scale, proof-of-concept study that evaluates a quality management approach for maternal and newborn health including communities, health facilities, and district health managers, supported by high-quality data from independent continuous household and health facility surveys. The study will generate robust evidence about the effectiveness of quality management and will inform future nationwide implementation approaches for health system strengthening in low-resource settings

Replication Data for: Open-space preservation in the Netherlands: Planning, practice and prospects

Open-space preservation is a planner's issue that is constantly debated, in particular on the success of the implemented instruments. We analysed the contribution of Dutch policies to open-space preservation by comparing actual land-use developments within different restrictive planning regimes. The Green Heart is the central open space within the ring of cities in the western part of the country. Protection of this area aimed at providing residents from the surrounding cities with opportunities for outdoor recreation at a short distance. The Buffer zones were designated in areas with a considerable urbanisation pressure and were intended to prevent specific cities from growing together into a solid urbanised belt, thus keeping separate cities recognisable as such in the landscape. In total, 10 Buffer zones have been designated, in size ranging from very small (3 hectares) to considerable (8700 hectares). Two relatively small zones are found in the heavily urbanised area near the city of Maastricht in the southern tip of the country. The others, in total claiming just over 20,000 hectares, are situated in the Randstad. The impact of these zones on urban development was first analysed in the related paper by Koomen, Dekkers and van Dijk (2008). In a subsequent paper we followed up on this analysis with other and more recent land-use data study the impact of changes in spatial planning and test the robustness of the results (Koomen and Dekkers, 2013). The relevant spatial data files are provided here as separate shapefiles that can be used in many GIS packages. The data uses the Dutch Rijksdriehoekstelsel_New (RD_New) projection system

Decarbonizing the transportation sector : policy options, synergies, and institutions to deliver on a low-carbon stabilization pathway

This paper outlines the key elements of a low-carbon stabilization pathway for land transport, focusing on the potential of key policy measures at the local and national level, opportunities for synergies of sustainable development and climate change objectives, and governance and institutional issues affecting the implementation of measures. It combines several approaches to provide an integrated view on the decarbonization of the transport sector based on recent literature. It will assess the quantitative basis potential climate change mitigation pathways and will then look into policy and institutional aspects that relate to the feasibility of these pathways. This combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis to measure the potential, options, and feasibility of climate change mitigation strategies in the transport sector aims to synthesize recent papers on the subject and draw conclusions for future research