Patient Satisfaction and Associated Factors with Services Provided at Outpatient Departments

Asking patients what they think how they feel about the health service they have received is an important step towards improving the quality of care and, ensuring that local health services are meeting clients needs and expectations. Facility- based cross-sectional study was conducted from April 1-7, 2019 in randomly selected primary hospitals found in Guraghe zone. There were 266 randomly selected patients who attended the primary hospitals were participated in the study. Data was collected using a interviewer-administered structured questionnaire and analyzed using SPSS version 21. Multiple logistic regression analysis used to identify predictors of patient satisfaction. The overall of patient satisfaction level with the health service provided at the outpatient departments of the primary hospitals was 66.5% (95% C.I. 60.8%-72.2%). waiting time (AOR 3.65), informing patients about cause of illness (AOR, 2.46) and waiting area cleanliness (AOR 2.33) were among the significant predictors of patients satisfaction. Acknowledging the limitation of the cross-sectional study design findings of this study indicate that waiting time, telling the cause of illness, cleanliness of the waiting area are important predictors of patient satisfaction

Evaluating usability of cross-platform smartphone applications

The computing power of smartphones is increasing as time goes. However, the proliferation of multiple different types of operating platforms affected interoperable smartphone applications development. Thus, the cross-platform development tools are coined. Literature showed that smartphone applications developed with the native platforms have better user experience than the cross-platform counterparts. However, comparative evaluation of usability of cross-platform applications on the deployment platforms is not studied yet. In this work, we evaluated usability of a crossword puzzle developed with PhoneGap on Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry. The evaluation was conducted focusing on the developer's adaptation effort to native platforms and the end users. Thus, we observed that usability of the cross-platform crossword puzzle is unaffected on the respective native platforms and the SDKs require only minimal configuration effort. In addition, we observed the prospect of HTML5 and related web technologies as our future work towards evaluating and enhancing usability in composing REST-based services for smartphone applications

Stochastic Resonance of a Flexible Chain Crossing over a Barrier

We study the stochastic resonance (SR) of a flexible polymer surmounting a bistable-potential barrier. Due to the flexibility that can enhance crossing rate and change chain conformations at the barrier, the SR behaviors manifest many features of an entropic SR of a new kind, such as the power amplification peaks at optimal chain lengths and elastic constants as well as the optimal noise strengths. The pronounced peaks that emerge depending on the chain lengths and conformation states suggest novel means of manipulating biopolymers, such as efficient separation methods, within undulating channels.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figure

Incidence and Predictors of Tuberculosis Among Adult PLWHA at Public Health Facilities of Hawassa City

Tuberculosis (TB) is the most frequently diagnosed opportunistic infection (OI) and disease in people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), world-wide. This study aimed at determining the incidence and predictors of tuberculosis among people living with HIV.A Six year retrospective follow up study was conducted among adult PLHIV. The Cox proportional hazards model was used to identify predictors.A total of 554 patients were followed and produced 1830.3 person year of observation. One hundred sixty one new TB cases occurred during the follow up period. The overall incidence density of TB was 8.79 per 100 person-year (PY). It was high (148.71/100 PY) in the first year of enrolment. The cumulative proportion of TB free survival was 79% and 67% at the end of first and sixth years, respectively. Not having formal education(AHR=2.68, 95%CI: 1.41, 5.11 ), base line WHO clinical stage IV (AHR = 3.22, 95% CI=1.91-5.41), CD4 count <50 cell/ul (AHR=2.41, 95%CI=1.31, 4.42), Being bed redden (AHR= 2.89, 95%CI=1.72, 3.78), past TB history (AHR=1.65, 95% CI = 1.06,2.39), substance use (AHR=1.46, 95% CI=1.03,2.06) and being on pre ART (AHR=1.62, 95%CI:1.03-2.54 ) were independently predicted tuberculosis occurrence. Advanced WHO clinical stage, limited functional status, past TB history, addiction and low CD4 (<50cell/ul) count at enrollment were found to be the independent predictor of tuberculosis occurrence. Therefore early initiation of treatment and intensive follow up is important

Numeracy Skills, Decision Errors, and Risk Preference Estimation

Basic numeracy skills are obviously important for rational decisionmaking when agents are facing choices between risky prospects. Poor and vulnerable people with limited education and numeracy skills live in risky environments and have to make rational decisions in order to survive. How capable are they to understand and respond rationally to economists’ tools for the elicitation of risk preferences? Can we make designs that are simple enough for them to give rational responses that reveal their true preferences? And how much does variation in their limited numeracy skills contribute to decision errors and the estimated sizes of their risk preference parameters? Finally, we ask whether Expected Utility (EU) theory is sufficient or whether Rank Dependent Utility (RDU) does better in the analysis of decision errors and risk preferences in our context. We try to answer these research questions based on a large sample of rural youth business group members from Ethiopia based on two variants of a Certainty Equivalent - Multiple Choice List (CE-MCL) approach with 12 and 10 Choice Lists (CLs) per subject. Numeracy skill scores are constructed based on a math test with 15 contextualized questions. The experiment facilitates the estimation of structural models while separating the effects of numeracy skills on decision errors in a Fechner error specification that is a function of numeracy skills and experimental design characteristics. The structural models estimate alternatively Expected Utility (EU) and Rank Dependent Utility (RDU) models, the latter with two-parameter Prelec probability weighting functions.It allows us to assess whether limited numeracy skills are correlated with EU-type risk tolerance (utility curvature) and RDU-type of probabilistic risk tolerance in the form of probabilistic insensitivity and optimism/pessimism bias. We find that weak numeracy skills are associated with slightly less risk tolerance in EU models, with stronger probabilistic insensitivity in RDU models, and with more random noise (Fechner error) in both types of models. However, even the subjects with the weakest numeracy skills performed quite well in the simple CE-MCL experiments with the binary choice elicitation approach, indicating that it was capable of revealing the risk preferences of such subjects with very low numeracy skills as they produced only marginally more decision errors than subjects with better numeracy skills

Can the risky investment game predict real world investments?

The incentivized risky investment game has become a popular tool in lab-in-the-field experiments for its simplicity and ease of comprehension compared to some of the more complex Multiple Choice List approaches that have been more commonly used in laboratory experiments. We use a field experiment to test whether the game can predict real-world investments by the same subjects based on the assumption that the game can provide a reliable measure of risk tolerance and that risk tolerance is an important predictor of investment behavior. The results show that the game cannot predict investment behavior in our sample. There are two reasons for this. First, we find substantial measurement error and low correlation when the game is repeated one year later for the same subjects. Measurement error is so large in our sample that the “obviously related instrumental variable” (ORIV) approach of Gillen, Snowberg and Yariv (2019) could not remedy the problem. Second, the game appears to suffer from low asset integration due to narrow bracketing, explaining its limited predictive power and the failure to detect attenuation bias due to measurement error. Subjects’ cognitive memory of the game played one year earlier is strongly positively related to investment intensity in the game and this result is much enhanced when correcting for the endogeneity of cognitive memory

Gender differences in investments and risk preferences

We analyze individual investment behavior among 822 young men and women that are members of 111 formal business groups in northern Ethiopia.We collected baseline data and investment data one year later combined with incentivized field experiments to obtain dis-aggregated risk preference data. We find that business women on average invest significantly less at individual level than business men but Cohen’s d values for the gender difference are moderate in size. Women are found to have higher Constant Relative Risk Aversion coefficients, to be more loss averse, but also to be more optimistic in their expectations than men. Women were also poorer in non-land assets, came from more land-poor parents and had lower incomes. The gender differences in risk attitudes and baseline endowments could explain some of but not all of the gender differences in investments

Lateral phase separation of confined membranes

We consider membranes interacting via short, intermediate and long stickers. The effects of the intermediate stickers on the lateral phase separation of the membranes are studied via mean-field approximation. The critical potential depth of the stickers increases in the presence of the intermediate sticker. The lateral phase separation of the membrane thus suppressed by the intermediate stickers. Considering membranes interacting with short and long stickers, the effect of confinement on the phase behavior of the membranes is also investigated analytically

Jahresbericht 1988 - 1989

Elektronische Version der gedr. Ausg. 199