Trends in the Relationship between Infant Mortality and Socioeconomic Status

Abstract

This paper reports some of the results of an ecological analysis of the relationship between infant mortality and economic status in metropolitan Ohio at three points in time (1959–1961, 1969–1971 and 1979–1981). The data presented clearly reveal the adverse mortality consequences of alow economic status. In spite of some remarkable declines in the infant death rate since 1960, most notably in neonatal mortality, the inverse socioeconomic differential in 1980 is as wide as it ever was, and it characterizes both whites and nonwhites and both the neonatal and postneonatal components of infant mortality. Moreover, in sharp contrast to the situation a generation ago, the neonatal death rate has emerged as a major contributor to the overall relationship between socioeconomic status and infant mortality. It is suggested that this situation reflects the failure of recent advances in maternal and infant care programs to reach those lower status members of the society that are most in need of them.     

Development of Local Welfare Services

The purpose of this article is to try to highlight some of the recent trends in thinking within local communities in Victoria, about how best to provide for the needs within their areas. We will also raise certain points regarding the role of the Social Worker employed to operate a localised community welfare service. The development of local services will probably, in the early stages, be distinct from that of Regional Services; regional development of functions carried out by the Social Welfare Department, the Mental Health Department, and voluntary organisations offering specialist help is essential throughout the state, and should occur concurrently with the establishment of local welfare offices.     

The effect of nonnormality on near-replicate lack-of-fit tests

We examine the effect of nonnormality on the distributions of near-replicate lack-of-fit F-tests. We show that when the number of clusters is large, the distributions of the lack-of-fit tests depend on the kurtosis of the error distribution, and that heavy-tailed error distributions can inflate significantly the sizes of the tests. This behaviour is also evident in small samples, where some lack-of-fit tests are clearly more affected than others by nonnormality. Two modifications of the F-tests are suggested to eliminate the effect of the kurtosis on the limiting null distributions, and their behaviour is studied for small samples.     

On broadcasting in unicyclic graphs

Broadcasting is an information dissemination problem in a connected network, in which one node, called the originator, disseminates a message to all other nodes by placing a series of calls along the communication lines of the network. Finding the broadcast time of a vertex in an arbitrary graph is NP-complete. The polynomial time solvability is shown only for trees. In this paper we present a linear algorithm that determines the broadcast time of any originator in an arbitrary unicyclic graph. As a byproduct, we find a broadcast center of the unicyclic graph. We also present an O(|V|+k ²) algorithm to find the broadcast time of an arbitrary unicyclic graph, where k is the length of the cycle. In the last section we give tight lower and upper bounds on broadcast time of a spanning tree based on the broadcast time of the unicyclic graph. The results of Sects. 2, 3 and most of the proofs in Sects. 2, 3 of this paper are presented by Harutyunyan and Maraachlian (Proceedings of 13th annual COCOON, pp. 372–383, 2007). All results in Sects. 4, 5 and the complete proof of Theorem 3 are new results.     

Barriers preventing high-quality nursing care of people with disabilities within acute care settings: a thematic literature review

This literature review was conducted to identify obstacles in the provision of quality nursing care to people with disabilities within acute care settings. Research in 2006 by the Disability Rights Commission found that people with disabilities have healthcare needs that are not being adequately met with the quality of care expected or anticipated. Obstacles to the provision of high-quality nursing care are a matter of concern to nursing clinicians, educators and researchers involved with establishing and maintaining professional standards of care for nursing practice. Therefore, this review has identified three major themes illustrating barriers to provision of high-quality nursing care in the acute care setting to people with disabilities. Themes identified were: professional competence, professional attitudes and organisational management. Nurses have an obligation to take into account the concerns and needs of individual clients with a disability.     

Informal Shelter Providers: Low Income Households Sheltering the Homeless

Despite the important role they play in preventing homelessness, those who shelter people who can not afford housing of their own have been neglected by researchers. This study examines the characteristics of these low income informal shelter providers. While informal shelter providers were similar to a comparison group of low income households that did not shelter others, there were also significant differences between the two groups. Informal shelter providers were more much more likely to live in single family dwellings, they were more likely to be long-term residents of the community, they were more likely to have experienced homelessness themselves, and they devoted a disproportionate share of their incomes to housing.     

Cost-effectiveness and coverage policy.

Cost-effectiveness analyses have become a pervasive element of health care. But they have not had a major impact on medical coverage policy. The challenge of implementing cost-effectiveness as a medical coverage criterion is related to the following issues: (1) Contract language does not include cost-effectiveness as a coverage criterion; (2) cost-effectiveness analyses often take the societal, population-based perspective, while health care is delivered on an individual basis; (3) there is no standard methodology for cost-effective analysis; (4) there is no explicit cut-off between cost-effective and cost-ineffective; and (5) cost-effectiveness analyses are not time sensitive.