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Chapter 13 of the book "Quick Reference to HIPAA Compliance" is presented. It explores other enacted laws affecting health plans in the U.S. in addition to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Among these laws are the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (COBRA), the Mental Health Parity Act of 1996 (MHPA), the Newborns' and Mothers' Health Protection Act of 1996 (NMHPA), the Women's Health and Cancer Rights Act of 1998 (WCHRA), and the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009.

Chapter 2 of the book "World Health Statistics 2005" is presented. It explores the percentage immunization coverage for measles, diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus toxoid (DPT3), and Hepatitis B for infants aged one year old. It highlights percentage antenatal care coverage including percentage of births attended by skilled health personnel and percentage rate of contraceptive usage. It investigates the number of children using insecticide-treated nets in malaria risk areas.

The article provides an overview of the topics and issues discussed in the 2005 issue of 'The World Health Report." It focuses on the Millennium Development Goals of the World Health Organization, which underlines the importance of improving health, particularly the maternal, newborn and child health. Under the report, exclusion was identified as a key feature of inequity in health care as well as a key constraint to the progress of public health.

This last chapter looks at the place of maternal, newborn and child health within a wider context of health system development. Today, maternal, newborn and child health are no longer discussed in purely technical terms, but as part of a broader agenda of universal access. This frames it within a straightforward political project: responding to society's demand for the protection of the health of citizens and access to care, a demand that is increasingly seen as legitimate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each year nearly 3.3 million babies are stillborn, and more than 4 million others die within 28 days of coming into the world. Deaths of babies during this neonatal period are as numerous as those in the next 11 months or those among children aged 1-4 years. Until recently there has been little real effort to tackle the specific health problems of newborns systematically; the care of the newborn has fallen through the cracks, as the continuity between maternal and child health programmes is often inadequate. Improving the health of newborns, however, does not just mean inserting a new programme: rather, it means adapting the efforts of maternal and child programmes so as to scale up services in a seamless continuum of care. This chapter ends by presenting a set of benchmarks and scenarios for scaling up access to both maternal and newborn care, with estimates of the costs that such scenarios would entail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For both mother and baby, childbirth can be the most dangerous moment in life. This chapter examines the main complications of childbirth, which claim an estimated 529 000 maternal deaths per year - almost all of them in developing countries. Most of the deaths and disabilities attributable to childbirth are avoidable, because the medical solutions are well known. Immediate and effective professional care during and after labour and delivery can make the difference between life and death for both women and their newborns. Each and every mother and each and every newborn needs skilled maternal and neonatal care provided by professionals at and after birth - care that is close to where and how people live, close to their birthing culture, but at the same time safe, with a skilled professional able to act immediately when largely unpredictable complications occur. The challenge that remains is therefore not technological, but strategic and organizational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter argues that the three most important components of care during pregnancy are first, providing good antenatal care, second, avoiding or coping with unwanted pregnancies, and third, building societies that support women who are pregnant. Despite increasing coverage in the last decade, antenatal care can only continue to realize its considerable potential by improving responsiveness, breaking down the barriers to access and refocusing on effective interventions. Given the extent of unintended pregnancy and the unacceptably high levels of unsafe abortion around the world, continuing efforts to provide family planning services, education, information and safe abortion services - to the extent allowed by law - are essential public health interventions. Tackling the low status of women, violence against women and lack of employment rights for pregnant women is vital in helping to build societies that support pregnant women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter seeks to explain why progress in maternal and child health has apparently stumbled so badly in many countries. It shows in detail how stagnations, reversals and slow progress in some countries are clearly related to poverty, HIV/AIDS, and humanitarian crises, leading to exclusion from access to health care. In many countries, the strategies put in place to provide health services have not produced the hoped for results. While many countries have based their health care systems on health districts, with a backbone of health centres and a referral district hospital, there has often been a failure to implement this model successfully in an exceedingly resource-constrained context. The chapter argues that the health district model still stands as a rational way for governments to organize decentralized health care delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The healthy future of society depends on the health of the children of today and their mothers, who are guardians of that future. However, despite much good work over the years, 10.6 million children and 529 000 mothers are still dying each year, mostly from avoidable causes. This chapter assesses the current status of maternal and child health programmes against their historical background. It then goes on to examine in more detail the patchwork of progress, stagnation and reversals in the health of mothers and children worldwide and draws attention to the previously underestimated burden of newborn mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 2 of the book "Research on reproductive health at WHO—pushing the frontiers of knowledge: Biennial Report 2002-2003" is presented. It discusses the issues on pregnancy and childbirth that have been considered by the Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction in developing acceptable and affordable maternal and newborn health programs in developing countries.

The article reports that the World Health Organization, United Nations Children's Fund, and the United Nations Population Fund have developed an approach to estimate maternal mortality for 2000. For this study, the country with the highest estimated number of maternal deaths is India, with 136,000. These estimates were carried out to draw attention to the existence and likely dimensions of the problem of maternal mortality around the world.

The article discusses the role of a midwife during the woman's childbirth. During normal labor, the midwife is suggested to evaluate the general condition of the woman. She must also assess fetal condition by focusing to its heart rate and membranes. And to provide an effective supportive care, she is also tasked to encourage the woman to have personal support from a person of her choice throughout the process, help the woman in labor who is anxious, fearful or in pain, and ensure mobility.

This chapter presents cross-cultural comparisons of experts' claims from four European countries on issues concerning reproductive genetics. Based on the Greek experts' claims, the thalassaemia success story emerged as the main cultural theme. Thalassaemia is a characteristic of the blood and carriers have an excess of red blood cells in comparison to noncarriers. Treatment is periodic blood transfusions, but this causes high concentrations of iron in the carrier's organs. The main over-arching cultural theme from the experts' interviews in the Netherlands was the politics of abortion. Experts claimed that right wing Christians or the Christian Democratic Party featured centrally in political debates on the issue. In England, the main overarching cultural theme was the need for ethics in reproductive genetics. One expert, an ethicist herself, believed that the ethical issues in medical genetics are different than in other areas of biomedicine. Another expert believed that the growth of prenatal technology brings a whole new cultural relationship to ethics. In Finland, a maternity care system has been in existence since the 1940s and experts claim that this system provides an appropriate infrastructure for prenatal screening and diagnosis, offered to a captive treatment population, the pregnant women.

The article focuses on the desires of women and the design of maternity care. The views of pregnant women have not been heard in this exchange of opinion. As part of our course on public health medicine we surveyed 299 women at varying stages of pregnancy in antenatal clinics at two hospitals in Leeds, asking them where they would prefer their baby to be born and why. It came as a surprise that only 8% of the women (95% confidence interval 4.8% to 10.6%) indicated they would prefer to have their labor at home. The most commonly given reason for preferring hospital birth was that skill and technology are available should any unforeseen complication arise (50%). This truth about the desires of women-that they are created by and are creators of, existing arrangements is not the end of the story, however. The alternative birth movement (ABM) brought together an interesting collection of people-feminists, members of the religious right, "back to nature" types, pro-family crusaders, peace activists, and libertarians-all of whom wanted to see U.S. obstetrics made more "humane," more "woman-centered. The movement employed a twofold strategy. On the local level, members of the ABM pressured hospitals to revise their policies, making room for more natural, less technological birth.

The article focuses on training women for home birth. In the Netherlands, health insurance companies, midwives, and spokespersons of women's rights tend to favor home birth. The Dutch maternity care system rests on the assumption that pregnancy and birth are normal life events. Thus the Dutch system functions on the basis of a continuous and prescribed selection of its clients, according to which everyone is assumed to get a unique and appropriate combination of professional care, technologies, and place (of birth). Dutch obstetrics, both in theory and in practice, has something of a hard time surviving in the midst of new prenatal technologies, women's demands for hospital birth and the shortage of practicing midwives and maternity nurses. During pregnancy, (Dutch) women's bodies are increasingly educated in trajectories in which markers of their pregnancy are produced outside and separated from their bodies, while no obvious efforts are made to reconnect these markers to the embodied pregnancy. Increasingly, women's obstetrical trajectories are marked by ultrasound, triple test, and amniocentesis, all of which inform a woman about her body, its health, and the growth and well-being of its little inhabitant. Women and midwives experience the pregnancy at least partly through these markers.

The article focuses on modern medical systems that have turned the normal complications of birth into quantifiable risks measured by diagnostic technologies. By the early twentieth century, obstetricians had replaced midwives as birth attendants in the United States, and a new view of the dangers of birth was emerging. As childbirth moved from a domestic to a medical event, obstetrical dangers became institutionalized within a growing body of medical knowledge. The first step in the social construction of obstetrical risk is the selection of a particular danger from among the many dangers that attend birth. Most often a danger becomes visible or measurable through the development of a new technology. Once captured by the biomedical gaze, the problem lies under the purview of obstetrical practice and ways are found to quantify and treat it. The presence of an obstetrical risk must be verified by output from a diagnostic technology that can register both the normal and the abnormal and show progress between the two states. When the numbers fluctuate outside the more or less arbitrarily defined limits of statistical norms, practitioners must either treat the condition or be able to justify why they are withholding treatment. The power of medicine is thus enacted. Risks are identified and can be controlled only through medical surveillance and treatment.

The article focuses on maternity care policies and maternity care practices. As a legal concept and social welfare tradition, Mutterschutz (maternity protection) has existed in Germany for over a century. Mutterschutzgesetz (maternity protection law) has evolved into a comprehensive set of laws regulating working hours, prenatal care, work breaks for women breastfeeding children, and financial support for unemployed pregnant women. Today, with the advantage of hindsight, the birth-by-design intentions of Mutterschutz in Germany have an ominous ring. But using social policy to achieve particular types of people and particular configurations of the family, motherhood, and paternity was not unique to Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Economic crisis, maniacal leadership, unchecked anti- Semitism, and much more contributed to the eventual development of Nazi Mutterschutz policy. A historical accounting of Mutterschutz would be remiss without an acknowledgment of the way a policy originally intended to support women's work in the home and factory served as a foundation upon which Nazi family policy was built twenty years later.

The article focuses on changes in midwifery and its effects on women as both providers of care and receivers of care. In the second half of the twentieth century there were several attempts to introduce midwifery in Canada. In the face of opposition from the medical and nursing professions and the inability of midwives to organize, these efforts failed initially. Pockets of midwifery practice remained in tightly knit ethnic communities and/or in northern outposts where British-trained nurse-midwives practiced unofficially. In the early 1970s there was some interest in nurse-midwifery, but the idea had little political support. Until 1993, Canada was the only industrialized nation not to have any provision for midwifery care. Many began practicing as assistants to physicians who attended home births; they were present to coach the woman through labor and to offer advice, reassurance, and comfort. This form of midwifery care focused on serving both the physical and emotional needs of the woman, providing her with information and following her lead in how she wanted to give birth. For the most part, midwives assistance at childbirth was restricted to home births. On occasion women who were not comfortable with a home birth but who wanted midwife care asked for their assistance at a hospital birth, but lack of official status severely limited midwives in the hospital.

The article presents a comparison of maternity care between United States and Sweden, while taking into account the impact of class, race/ethnicity and immigration. The United States has a largely privatized health care system, and it values individual choice and innovation while downplaying the necessity of equality and any right to health care. Sweden, by contrast, considers health care a right to which all should have equal access and has guaranteed universal health care, including maternity care (like most other high-income countries). As one might expect, the American focus on individual choice means that more has been written about women's desires concerning, and responses to, childbirth in the United States than in Sweden, whereas Sweden's emphasis on equality of outcome means that much of the research has focused on uncovering differences in measurable birth outcomes. The initial cornerstone of Sweden's current maternity care system of maternal health centers and family-friendly policies was laid in the 1930s. All female citizens as well as permanent residents are entitled to regular prenatal check-ups, childbirth in a hospital, and postnatal care, including home visits. The steady and largely successful assault of sixty years of social democracy on class inequalities in Sweden has had the somewhat paradoxical effect of keeping class awareness at the forefront of the social imagination.

The article focuses on the alternative birth movement (ABM) which arose to help women in reclaiming their agency in childbirth, in North America. The greater strength of the ABM in North America is due, in part, to the connection between the movement and efforts to restore and preserve midwifery. In the United States and Canada, unlike in Western Europe, midwifery was essentially eliminated by the middle of the twentieth century. The ABM in the United States and Canada had its beginnings in the 1950s, when growing numbers of women began to feel alienated from the prevailing obstetrical techniques. The criticism of birth practices was not an isolated phenomenon. Rather, the ABM was part of large-scale structural and cultural changes that were occurring in the 1970s and 1980s, including antiwar protests, civil rights and minority activism, the rise of the counterculture, environmentalism, and the first stirrings of feminism. At first, consumers and birth practitioners in both North American countries formed joint organizations, one of the most influential being the National Association of Parents and Professionals for Safe Alternatives in Childbirth. In Canada and many of the states, the distinction between mothers and midwives was neither encouraged nor apparent because the midwives in the movement were often mothers who were learning how to accompany other mothers at birth.

The article focuses on the maternity care policy and the care aspects at the time of the childbirth. In Canada and the United States, the maternity care division of labor is characterized by medical dominance; midwives play a minimal, supportive role. Britain, on the other hand, has a long tradition of independent midwifery practice, although maternity care policies created after World War II have favored physicians and hospital birth. Traditionally, the interest groups most involved in maternity care policy have been maternity care providers, including physicians, midwives, nurses, and, in some cases, labor assistants. With the rise of the women's health and home birth movements, maternity care clients have become involved in the policymaking process either overtly through political organizations or latently through demands for particular services. In several cases, consumers have joined with providers, midwives in particular, to create a kind of advocacy coalition to push for changes in maternity care policy. In countries where the government is involved in public health and health insurance, the state is an important actor in the maternity care policy process.

The article focuses on the maternal health service policy in three countries, Great Britain, Finland and Canada and the impact of such policies. Welfare states shoulder responsibility for the well-being of inhabitants, this obligation cannot be easily consigned to the individual, private business firm or local community. Of course, good intentions do not always lead to good results. Not all policies of the welfare state promote greater equality between different societal groups. Despite this general similarity, maternal health policy in Britain, Finland, and Canada differs in significant ways. In Britain and Finland, for example, strong state intervention in the first half of the twentieth century shaped the organization of maternity care services, but in the last two decades these two countries developed very different maternity policies. In Canada, the care of pregnant women, especially in urban areas, remained firmly in the hands of male physicians working in private practice until the 1960s. Until the emergence of national health insurance in the late 1960s, the role of the state was largely limited to provision of maternity education. In the last decade, maternity care in Canada, as in Britain, has become politicized and provincial governments are seeking to change existing maternity care arrangements.

The article focuses on the place of birth which has shifted from the home to large hospitals. The hospitalization of birth encourages the use of technologies that can only feasibly be applied in a hospital. As the twentieth century progressed, hospitals became centers where new technologies could be easily tested and then applied to large numbers of women. The concentration of women in one place made the training and staffing needed to maintain the technologies clinically safer and economically feasible, the presence of the latest scientific technologies in hospitals served to enhance their prestige as centers of science. Hospitalization of birth also has a variety of economic and social consequences. It makes feasible a larger client base for providers, a particularly important issue in those countries whose funding system rewards physicians for the size of their practice. It also eases the demands on providers and allows health planners to make care more efficient. Bringing large numbers of patients to a central location is much more economical for providers and planners than providing care in homes or in a series of small cottage hospitals.

The article presents an introduction to the book "Birth by Design." The differences in birth outcomes between certified nurse midwife and physician attended births may be explained in part by difference in prenatal, labor and delivery care practices. Maternity care can be distinguished from other forms of medical care because, what is at stake in care at birth is not the survival of one patient but the reproduction of society, latent in the care given to women at birth are ideas about sexuality, about women, and about families, while all other medical specialties (with the possible exception of pediatrics) begin with a focus on disease, the essential task here is the supervision of normal, healthy, physical growth, the quality of maternity care in both senses of that word, its nature and its outcomes is often used as a measure for the quality of an entire health care system. Infant mortality rates have become a shorthand measure for the adequacy of a society's health system and its overall quality of life. Unfortunately, social scientists have overlooked this distinctive characteristic of maternity care. "Birth by Design" provides a remedy for this social scientific ethnocentrism.

A chapter from the book "No Paradise Yet: The World's Women Face the New Century" is presented. It discusses maternity and child care in the Philippines. It reports that Filipino women work as a matter of economic necessity and combines motherhood and childcare with labour. According to the government, women comprise 48% of the total workforce. There is scarcity of childcare facilities and many women find it difficult to breastfeed once maternity leave ends.

Chapter 2 of the book "Social Work in Health Settings: Practice in Context" is presented. It focuses on social work in a perinatal AIDS program. A brief background on the Maternal-Child Health AIDS Prevention and Treatment Program at The Medical Center is provided. The implications of the conflict between public health priorities and individual civil liberties for childbearing ages, as the AIDS epidemic enters its third decade are discussed. The extent to which technological solutions are available to counteract disease processes have an impact on the relational dimensions that are formed between social worker and client.

The article presents a list of reference sources and information services that index or abstract the book "Fundamentals of Perinatal Social Work: A Guide for Clinical Practice With Women, Infants, and Families," edited by Regina Furlong Lind and Debra Honig Bachman. It includes "Abstracts in Social Gerontology: Current Literature on Aging," "Behavioral Medicine Abstracts," and the caredata CD: the social and community care database.

This article explores issues of human sexuality and feminism as they apply to perinatal social work services in high-risk reproductive situations. Childbearing will be examined in tour phases: pre-pregnancy and conception, pregnancy, labor and childbirth, and post-partum. Although the multiple issues of each phase are recognized, the article will concentrate primarily on the sexual issues. The Women's Movement has influenced changes resulting in a more humane approach to childbearing. The choices now available to women will provide a forum for discussion of interventions to be made by perinatal social workers in high-risk reproductive situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the advantage of the perinatal and neonatal case management model as experienced by providers, payers and patients. Background of perinatal and neonatal services; Development and marketing of case management services; Financial incentives for outpatient case management.

Chapter XXIV of the book " A Daughter of the Land," by Gene Stratton-Porter is presented. It highlights on Polly who is entering marriage with Hank Peters which Kate Bates commented about Polly working too hard when she begins to take orders from Mrs. Amanda Peters. Moreover, it notes when Polly's approaching maternity.

An encyclopedia entry for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which refer to goals that United Nations member states promise to achieve by 2015, is presented. The MDGs include the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, achievement of universal primary education, promotion of gender equality and women empowerment, improvement of maternal health and development of global partnership for development.

The article presents a critical assessment of the treatment of women at birth or maternal care. This single-minded focus on power relations in maternity care was driven by the close links between researchers and the campaigns to reform birth practices that populated the social landscape when the academic study of maternity care was in its infancy. But the field is maturing. Thirty years after the first feminist exposes of the mistreatment of women at birth, maternity care research is becoming more closely linked to academic disciplines and to ongoing scholarly debates. The chapter discusses the issue most central to the organization of maternity services in the twentieth century, the location of birth. Although much discussed in the literature, the topic has not been exhausted and is sorely in need of a perspective drawn from the comparison of developments in different countries. Home birth remains part of the care system in the Netherlands and is being encouraged again in Great Britain, while in Norway policymakers are defending small maternity hospitals in rural areas. The variation presented in this chapter in policy and in the roles of birth attendants and technology makes clear that it is too early to argue for convergence in the organization of birth in high-income countries.

An encyclopedia entry for "Prenatal Screening" is presented. This screening is important in detecting major and minor fetal congenital malformations. It enables the preparation of adequate care for the neonate, especially for neural tube defects and cardiac defects. It is also recommended to determine whether any anomalies in the developing fetus are evident for the purposes of intervention.

The article provides information on the mental health care system in Vanuatu. Several mental health resources including mental health policy, substance abuse policy and the National Mental Health Programme are absent in the Country. It has a government disaster management department which serves as mental health for disaster affected population. Other services that are linked with a radiotelephone service include primary care, child and maternity clinics.

The article discusses the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and targets of the United Nations (UN). The UN aims to eradicate extreme poverty, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat diseases, ensure environmental sustainability and develop a global partnership for development.

The article discusses several ways of managing pregnancy complication emergencies. It notes that there should be careful planning, clinical guideline compliance, and close monitoring of patient to prevent emergencies. However, if emergencies do occur, members of the clinical team should know their roles and functions in order to respond effectively. It adds that emergency management procedures include staying calm, being attentive, and taking in-charge.

The article presents an introduction to the book "Birth by Design." It presents a fascinating study of how vestiges of the former East and West Germany influence attitudes about, and the use of, prenatal diagnostic technology. It shows that policies in and of themselves do not dictate women's experiences of maternity care. The nearly parallel development of maternity care policies in East and West Germany had very varying impacts on the women and men living in these two nation-states, due in large measure to the value placed on women's work. It examine the concept of risk within obstetrics, using the anthropological understanding of risk as an idea that is culturally constituted and reflective of particular social institutions in a particular historical and political. The U.S. malpractice system is compared to those in Sweden and the Netherlands, where the employment of obstetrical technologies and malpractice litigation are far less commonplace. The authors claim that medical technologies are neither good nor bad a priori, rather, it is the way such technologies are employed or not that make maternity care practices undesirable.

The article presents an introduction to the book "Birth by Design." Midwifery in the United Kingdom exemplifies an occupation that appears to be strong but is struggling to find independence. Midwifery in the United Kingdom is state-funded; midwives are university-educated, and they attend the majority of all births. But as salaried employees of the National Health Service, most midwives work in a very hierarchical system and complain about long hours and poor pay. Midwifery in Germany has a long tradition, but today most midwives work under the supervision of an obstetrician. In the Netherlands midwives practice as private entrepreneurs at home and in the hospital. Dutch midwives benefit from legislation that limits competition from both family doctors and obstetricians, but their status is uncertain and their pay modest. Midwifery in Canada had largely vanished by the 1980s, but is now reappearing with the support of the state. The book looks at education in the widest sense of the word ranging from informal unofficial hands-on training by apprenticeship to formal and official education that leads to a government-endorsed license.

The author reflects on the importance of improving the quality of health care services for mothers, newborn and children, worldwide. He calls for the creation of an integrated and effective health systems, and discusses how families and communities can help to address the problem on health care services. He also discusses the need of public health programs to work together that all families can have access to continuous care that extends from pregnancy, through childbirth and into childhood.

The article discusses the role of midwives and doctors at a district hospital in caring for pregnant women with complications. Aside from their role to provide care to pregnant women in facilities, they also have a unique relationship with the community of health care providers, family members of the patients, and community leaders. Moreover, midwives and doctors should support the improvement of district health services and monitor the quality of health care services.

A preface for the book "Managing Complications in Pregnancy and Childbirth: A guide for midwives and doctors" is presented.

This article introduces the content of the book, The Anthropology of Welfare, by Iain R. Edgar and Andrew Russell. The book provides an overview of what anthropology has to offer welfare studies and vice versa. Case studies from anthropologists in the field examine different branches of welfare and community care, for example: maternity services; children with learning difficulties; children's homes; mothers' centers; people with HIV; mental health centers; housing; and care and provision for the elderly. Examples are taken from urban and rural areas of Great Britain, the U.S., Sweden, Germany, Portugal and New Zealand. In each case the theoretical and methodological appropriateness of social anthropology for the study of welfare, and the insights gained by bringing anthropology and welfare together, are examined. The Anthropology of Welfare will be essential reading for those studying anthropology, social work and social policy and will be of interest to teachers, practitioners and researchers in applied social welfare fields.