683 research outputs found

    Innovations in Monitoring Vital Events:Mobile Phone SMS Support to Improve Coverage of Birth and Death Registration: A Scalable Solution

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    Civil Registration (CR) of births and deaths is an essential component of any health information system.\ud Globally, across low income countries, CR suffers from unacceptably poor quality coverage. This Health\ud Information Systems Knowledge Hub (HIS Hub) working paper summarises and reports the results, conclusions and outlook from a small six-month project that investigated the potential of introducing a mobile phone step into the routine CR system in a rural district in Tanzania. The project developed a computer application that could receive SMS messages—from existing basic mobile phones of community-based CR officers—and feed them directly to the District Registrar’s office and computer. The message contained the details from the birth or death notification form. The system provided instant access to notifications and automatic feedback to the Village Executive Officer (VEO) if the family that experienced the birth or death event failed to register the event for certification. It also prompted the VEO to follow up with the family by conducting a questionnaire, administered by mobile phone, to determine and communicate the reasons for the non-registration. The District Civil Registrar was also able to monitor trends in these notifications via a user-friendly webbased browser and dashboard. The system was tested for six months and validated against an independent prospective household surveillance system that monitors pregnancies, births and deaths in the same period. In summary, the findings showed that the routine CR system notified only 28% of total births in the period. Adding the SMS step increased this to 51% of births. The routine CR system notified only 2.1% of deaths in the period. Adding the SMS step increased this to 14% of deaths. The SMS step therefore made significant improvements in the notification step (and modest improvements in the registration step) of routine CR. However, both notifications and registrations still fell well short of reality at community level. The most important finding of this pilot is that the current CR system in at least the study district, and likely in most of rural Tanzania, is essentially unable to provide adequate registration coverage for births and deaths, and that coverage is so low that even log order improvements are insufficient to lift it to satisfactory levels (in excess of 90%). This, as yet, says nothing regarding the quality of the data. No overwhelming reason is provided by families for the low reporting rate, suggesting that the problems are highly systemic and will need a radical redesign of CR processes to solve. To the extent that similar problems prevail in other low-income countries, it is clear that whatever these processes will be, some form of scalable real-time mobile communication such as SMS will greatly facilitate coverage levels. This pilot shows\ud that such technology is feasible. But these results also emphasise the need for an end-to-end overhaul of the\ud architecture and processes of how CR systems are built and integrated into the information fabric of a country. Small incremental technical fixes will not suffice\u

    Shadowed by the Veil of the Colorline: An Autoethnography of a Teacher of Color at a Catholic Predominantly White Institution (CPWI) in the United States

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    Findings from a case study autoethnography are reported. Catholic education in the United States remains predominantly white demographically. While efforts have been made to address this issue from a student standpoint, more attention is required on racially diversifying the faculty and staff. In order to achieve this, voices of color and their stories must be included in the dialogue. The researcher (also the subject) recalls his first year of teaching at a Catholic Predominantly Catholic Institution (CPWI) over two decades ago in this autoethnography. The qualitative data is analyzed through a critical race theoretical framework based on the work of W. E. B. DuBois

    The Jesuit Social Justice Dialectic within the Cristo Rey School Model

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    This article reports findings from a qualitative case study of a Cristo Rey Jesuit high school. The Jesuit social justice dialectic strives to maintain a balance between the preservation of the virtue of the Jesuit mission and the selling of the Jesuit brand. The Jesuit mission consists of Catholic evangelization through cultural immersion and social justice. The Jesuit brand consists of the accumulation of financial wealth and political influence essential to the ambitions of the Jesuit mission coming to fruition. This journal article explores this Jesuit social justice dialectic in action looking at the corporate work-study program utilized in the sustainability of the Cristo Rey school model. This innovative student work program ensures the political, economic sustainability of the Cristo Rey model (the Jesuit brand) so that it can provide accessibility to a population severely underrepresented in traditional US Jesuit education (the Jesuit mission). This article explores the complexity of this Jesuit social justice dialectic through the corporate work-study program in Cristo Rey education that include the benefits of collaboration and the challenges of parochialism

    An autonomous navigational system using GPS and computer vision for futuristic road traffic

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    Navigational service is one of the most essential dependency towards any transport system and at present, there are various revolutionary approaches that has contributed towards its improvement. This paper has reviewed the global positioning system (GPS) and computer vision based navigational system and found that there is a large gap between the actual demand of navigation and what currently exists. Therefore, the proposed study discusses about a novel framework of an autonomous navigation system that uses GPS as well as computer vision considering the case study of futuristic road traffic system. An analytical model is built up where the geo-referenced data from GPS is integrated with the signals captured from the visual sensors are considered to implement this concept. The simulated outcome of the study shows that proposed study offers enhanced accuracy as well as faster processing in contrast to existing approaches

    The Creation of the Regis Jesuit High School Girls Division: Same Sex Education for Young Women in American Catholic Jesuit Secondary Education

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    Findings from a historiographic case study are reported. Qualitative data was collected from a series of interviews and cultural artifacts exploring the history of the creation of the Regis Jesuit High School, Girls Division- the first American all girls Catholic Jesuit high school. The study traces the process of how Regis Jesuit became a co-divisional campus educating both women and men in same sex classes utilizing Ignatian Strategic Planning conceptual framework that emphasizes the Jesuit concept of Magis while exploring its impact on the historical and contemporary role that women play in the Jesuit mission

    Elective induction of labour at 39 weeks versus expectant management up to 41 weeks in a tertiary care centre

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    Background: The timing of delivery and effective management of labour at term makes a huge difference in the obstetric and perinatal outcome. There have always been controversies between choosing the elective induction of labour at 39 weeks versus expectant management up to 41/42 weeks which can result in placental ageing, reduced liquor, non-assuring fetal heart tracings, meconium stained amniotic fluid and fetal macrosomia.  our objective was to perform a comparative effectiveness analysis of elective induction of labor at 39 weeks gestational age among nulliparous women with uncomplicated singleton pregnancies as compared to expectant management up to 41 weeks.Methods: 120 primigravidae with singleton pregnancies with fetus in cephalic presentation were recruited into the study and divided into 2 groups of 60 each A: Patients were induced electively using dinoprostone gel (maximum 3 doses 8 hours apart) B: They were managed expectantly up to 41 weeks allowing for spontaneous onset of labour, induction or cesarean section was done for obstetric indications between 39 and 41 weeks and pregnancy was  terminated by induction for those who continued up to 41 weeks. Their obstetric and perinatal outcome were noted.Results: The cesarean section rates were higher in the expectantly managed group (21%) when compared to the electively induced group (16%). The same was with instrumental delivery rates (15% versus 10%). The perinatal outcome was poorer for the expectantly managed group with 20% NICU admissions and 5% perinatal deaths compared to the electively induced group which had 12% NICU admissions and 3.3% perinatal deaths. The expectantly managed group also resulted in respiratory distress in a larger number of fetuses and resulted in problems due to reduced liquor.Conclusions: Elective induction at 39 weeks gestational age was found to be a better option compared to expectant management up to 41 weeks in terms of obstetric and perinatal outcomes
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