Needs Assessment of Medical Care for Rural Jamaicans That Require Assistance from Short-Term Medical Missions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IntroductionShort Term Medical Missions (STMMs) are defined as by a group of physicians to a foreign country for the purpose of making a special study or of undertaking a special study of a short-tenn (1). This broad definition encompasses a wide range of services, ranging from surgical missions providing craniofacial reconstruction or cataract extraction (2,3) to medical and/or pediatric missions providing care for acute illness and chronic disease (4). STMMs have been hugely successful in delivering greatly needed medical care to much of the developing world. Annually, there are approximately 6000 STMMs sent out from the United States alone, totaling an annual expenditure of around $250 million (5). They appeal to physicians and other medical professionals due to their unique combination of philanthropy and direct approach to patient care (6). Missions differ widely in size (2 to 90 health care providers per mission) (7), budget (from a few hundred dollars to $39 million in annual expenses) (8) , duration (from 2 days to several months in length) (9) , and logistical detail.Although STMMs have good intentions, there are sometimes issues that arise with the practical implementation of STMMs; these may include thepaucity of follow-up data, inadequate relations with the local health care system, and lack of sustainability (5). In order for these problems to be addressed more successfully, a collection of relevant literature concerning the medical of the typical population cared for by STMMs in the country of focus is needed. Without proper research beforehand, issues of efficacy, quality control, and impact may be easily overlooked (5).Jamaica is a nation of approximately 2.6 million people of which a sizeable minority (14.8%) lives in poverty (10).The unemployment rate in Jamaica (12.9%) is relatively high, and the country has a considerable debt-to-GDP ratio of 120% (10). Jamaica has a public and free health care system. Even though each year the Government of Jamaica invests millions of dollars into health care, many rural Jamaicans may feel that they either don't have the funds or the time to travel to regional health centers, which are often a number of kilometers away. Thus, there is a great need for STMMs to help with overcoming the vast medical of the rural population. In order for STMMs to be efficient and focused in their execution, they must have a sound understanding of the medical of the rural population being cared for.Unfortunately, to date, there has been a lack of published information in this field. Prior to the creation of this study, a literature search using PubMed (1947 to 2010) and PubMed Central (1947 to 2010) was conducted. The search terms Jamaica, short term medical mission, and needs assessment were used to elicit relevant literature. Studies were deemed relevant if they tried to comprehensively outline the medical of the rural population in Jamaica. No relevant studies were found. Therefore, to date, this is the first study that aims to offer a collection of statistics concerning the medical of a sample of rural Jamaicans being cared for by a STMM.MethodsWe participated in a STMM with Crystal Mission International (CMI) to Jamaica from July 1st-July 8th, 2011. CMI is a privately owned charitable organization based in Toronto, Canada that is funded exclusively by private donations. Our STMM team consisted of a variety of physicians, nurses, medical students, and volunteers.The medications that were brought to Jamaica included the Physician Travel Pack as outlined by Health Partners International of Canada, as well as a charitable pharmaceutical donation from Teva Canada. The STMM was fully approved by the Jamaican Ministry of Health.To the rural population, our mission was advertised towards a pediatric population; however, with the help of local health authorities, our scope of work was extended to adults as well. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".