Paramedic-conducted Mental Health Counselling for Abused Women in Rural Bangladesh: An Evaluation from the Perspective of Participants

This paper reports on evaluation of an initiative to use paramedics as the first-level mental health counsellors of abused women in rural Bangladesh (2003–2004) from the perspective of the abused women who participated in one or more counselling sessions. Thirty in-depth interviews, followed by a survey (n=372), targeted to cover all participants, were conducted in 2006. Overall, the arrangement, management of ethical issues, and skills of paramedics were rated favourably. Most (89%) abused women (n=372) considered the session useful; one-fourth of these women considered it very useful; and only a few abused women considered the session useless. Usefulness of the session was expressed mostly in terms of relief attained after talking about the issue. Most (87%) women reported being encouraged to be self-confident. In a context characterized by low self-confidence of women, lack of opportunity to talk about violence, and absence of professional mental health counselling services, this initiative is sufficiently promising to warrant further testing

Paramedic-Conducted Mental Health Counselling for Abused Women in Rural Bangladesh: An Evaluation from the Perspective of Participants

This paper reports on evaluation of an initiative to use paramedics as the first-level mental health counsellors of abused women in rural Bangladesh (2003-2004) from the perspective of the abused women who participated in one or more counselling sessions. Thirty in-depth interviews, followed by a survey (n=372), targeted to cover all participants, were conducted in 2006. Overall, the arrangement, management of ethical issues, and skills of paramedics were rated favourably. Most (89%) abused women (n=372) considered the session useful; one-fourth of these women considered it very useful; and only a few abused women considered the session useless. Usefulness of the session was expressed mostly in terms of relief attained after talking about the issue. Most (87%) women reported being encouraged to be self-confident. In a context characterized by low self-confidence of women, lack of opportunity to talk about violence, and absence of professional mental health counselling services, this initiative is sufficiently promising to warrant further testing

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Mobile Phone Including Smart Phone based Persuasive System Design for controlling Hypertension and Diabetes in Bangladesh

Hypertension (HTN) as well as type 2 diabetes (T2D) is considered as two of the leading medical and public health problems in the world. Despite several interventions, both these diseases are on the rise in Bangladesh, which is characterized by socio-cultural differences and limited access to latest technology. Literature survey revealed gaps including lack of a mobile based HTN and T2D control framework as well as service for developing countries and lack of instant peer support. In addition to this, simple SMS reminder service is not very effective. In this paper we have tried to answer the two research questions (1) how to develop a framework for designing a multi-intervention service for HTN and T2D prevention & control in Bangladesh and (2) how to develop a service based on the framework. We have adopted Hevner\u27s design science framework, social cognitive theories and persuasive technology for answering these questions. The result of this study includes the development of a mobile phone based multi-intervention framework as well as service for HTN and T2D prevention/control in developing countries especially Bangladesh

Australia's mothers and babies 2012

Summary: Australia\u27s mothers and babies 2012 is the twenty-second annual report on pregnancy and childbirth in Australia. In 2012, a total of 307,474 women gave birth to 312,153 babies. This is a 3.4% increase in the total number of births compared with that for 2011. Mothers The average maternal age in 2012 was 30.1 compared with 29.5 in 2003. Approximately 42% of women were having their first baby and the average age of first-time mothers was 28.4. Of all first-time mothers in 2012, 14% were aged 35 or older compared with 12% in 2003. Assisted reproductive technology (ART) was used by 4% of women who gave birth in the 5 jurisdictions for which data on ART were available. Antenatal factors Smoking while pregnant was reported by about 13% of all mothers and by 35% of teenage mothers. About one-fifth (21%) of women who reported smoking during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy did not report smoking during the second 20 weeks. Over three-fifths (63%) of women attended at least 1 antenatal visit before 14 weeks gestation, although 15% of women did not receive antenatal care until after 20 weeks. Indigenous mothers Overall, 4% of women who gave birth during 2012 identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander. Indigenous mothers were younger than non-Indigenous mothers; their average age in 2012 was 25.2 compared with 30.3 for non-Indigenous mothers. Smoking during pregnancy was reported by almost half (48%) of Indigenous mothers. Of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander mothers who reported smoking during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, 12% did not report smoking after 20 weeks, half that of non-Indigenous mothers (23%). One-quarter (25%) of Indigenous babies were born to mothers who identified as non-Indigenous. Labour and delivery The average duration of pregnancy was 38.7 weeks. Onset of labour was spontaneous for 54% of women giving birth and induced for 26%. Most women (68%) had a vaginal birth and, of these births, 82% did not involve the use of instruments. Overall, 32% of women gave birth by caesarean section in 2012, similar to the proportion (32.3%) in 2011. The caesarean section rate among first-time mothers was 33% in 2012. Among women who had already given birth at least once, 29% had had a previous birth by caesarean section. Baby outcomes In 2012, 9% of babies were born pre-term (before 37 completed weeks of gestation) and 0.6% post-term (42 weeks gestation or more). Overall, 6% of liveborn babies were of low birthweight (less than 2,500 grams) and this doubled (12%) among mothers who smoked during pregnancy. One in 5 (20%) babies received some form of resuscitation at birth, although almost half (49%) received only suction or oxygen therapy. The perinatal death rate was 9.6 per 1,000 births in 2012, with 7.2 fetal deaths per 1,000 births and 2.4 neonatal deaths per 1,000 live births. This compares with 9.9 perinatal deaths per 1,000 births in 2011, 7.4 fetal deaths per 1,000 births and 2.6 neonatal deaths per 1,000 live births

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press