Browsing by Subject "public health"

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    2020 Aspen-Nicholas Water Forum Water Affordability and Equity Briefing Document
    (2020-08-12) Patterson, Lauren; Doyle, Martin
    The importance of water and sanitation for public health is once again visible and may change the trajectory of the water sector moving forward. Given that water is essential for public health, what must be done to ensure that these life-sustaining services are affordable and accessible to all and the utilities providing services are financially resilient? How do we reconcile the different values as individuals and society negotiate who decides, who gets what, and who pays. In a just society this process is inclusive, meaning all have a seat at the table. To unpack these questions, this paper explores the evolution of water services in the United States. The construction of water and wastewater systems during the 19th and early 20th century were significant feats. Now, most people have access to water, most tap water is drinkable, most dams are secure, most farms can grow more with less water, and most rivers are cleaner than they were 50 years ago. Most does not mean all. There is growing evidence that an increasing number of Americans are losing access to safe drinking water and sanitation—and others never had it at all.
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    Optimising mHealth helpdesk responsiveness in South Africa: towards automated message triage.
    (BMJ global health, 2018-01) Engelhard, Matthew; Copley, Charles; Watson, Jacqui; Pillay, Yogan; Barron, Peter; LeFevre, Amnesty Elizabeth
    In South Africa, a national-level helpdesk was established in August 2014 as a social accountability mechanism for improving governance, allowing recipients of public sector services to send complaints, compliments and questions directly to a team of National Department of Health (NDoH) staff members via text message. As demand increases, mechanisms to streamline and improve the helpdesk must be explored. This work aims to evaluate the need for and feasibility of automated message triage to improve helpdesk responsiveness to high-priority messages. Drawing from 65 768 messages submitted between October 2016 and July 2017, the quality of helpdesk message handling was evaluated via detailed inspection of (1) a random sample of 481 messages and (2) messages reporting mistreatment of women, as identified using expert-curated keywords. Automated triage was explored by training a naïve Bayes classifier to replicate message labels assigned by NDoH staff. Classifier performance was evaluated on 12 526 messages withheld from the training set. 90 of 481 (18.7%) NDoH responses were scored as suboptimal or incorrect, with median response time of 4.0 hours. 32 reports of facility-based mistreatment and 39 of partner and family violence were identified; NDoH response time and appropriateness for these messages were not superior to the random sample (P>0.05). The naïve Bayes classifier had average accuracy of 85.4%, with ≥98% specificity for infrequently appearing (<50%) labels. These results show that helpdesk handling of mistreatment of women could be improved. Keyword matching and naïve Bayes effectively identified uncommon messages of interest and could support automated triage to improve handling of high-priority messages.
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    Visualizing COVID Restrictions: Activity Patterns Before, During, and After COVID-19 Lockdowns in Uttar Pradesh, India.
    (Socius : sociological research for a dynamic world, 2022-01) Varela, Gabriel; Swanson, Kendal; Pasquale, Dana K; Mohanan, Manoj; Moody, James W
    Globally, restrictions implemented to limit the spread of COVID-19 have highlighted deeply rooted social divisions, raising concerns about differential impacts on members of different groups. Inequalities among households of different castes are ubiquitous in certain regions of India. Drawing on a novel data set of 8,564 households in Uttar Pradesh, the authors use radar plots to examine differences between castes in rates of activity for several typical behaviors before, during, and upon lifting strict lockdown restrictions. The visualization reveals that members of all castes experienced comparable reductions in activity rates during lockdown and recovery rates following it. Nonetheless, members of less privileged castes procure water outside the household more often than their more privileged peers, highlighting an avenue of improvement for future public health efforts.