[Ultrasound in East Africa]

Ultrasound is poorly established in East Africa because of missing finances and medical staff. The Foundation for medical know how transfer SmW installed in the last 3 years an ultrasound department in all District Hospitals in the South Province Mombasa in Kenya and was teaching the medical staff 2-3 times an year according the guidelines of SGUM and EFSUMB. The project is based on the idea that knowledge transfer is more efficient than money transfer. The project is supervised by public health studies. The first results show that non physicians are able to perform good quality ultrasound examinations. 75% of the obstetrical and 50% of the abdominal ultrasound examinations show therapy-relevant findings. Ultrasound is going to rise to the position of the most important imagine system in developing countries.

Developing academic surgery in a socialized health care system: a 35-year experience

The most important benefit of a socialized health care system is the elimination of the threat of personal financial ruin to pay for medical care. Serious disadvantages of a socialized health care system, particularly in a university hospital setting, include restricted financial resources for education and patient care, limited working facilities, and loss of physician-directed decision making in planning and prioritizing. This article describes how a group practice model has supported clinical and academic activities within the faculty of medicine of our university and offers this model as a possible template for other surgical and medical disciplines working in an academic socialized environment.

Parental controls: past indiscretions lead to tighter reins on new and future conversion foundations

Conversion foundations created when a struggling not-for-profit hospital sells to a for-profit company have billions at their disposal to help their communties. The decision to create one and its direction are locally based. "It's really the community that drives it," says Martin Rash, of RegionalCare.

Funding source and research report quality in nutrition practice-related research

BACKGROUND

The source of funding is one of many possible causes of bias in scientific research. One method of detecting potential for bias is to evaluate the quality of research reports. Research exploring the relationship between funding source and nutrition-related research report quality is limited and in other disciplines the findings are mixed.

OBJECTIVE

The purpose of this study is to determine whether types of funding sources of nutrition research are associated with differences in research report quality.

DESIGN

A retrospective study of research reporting quality, research design and funding source was conducted on 2539 peer reviewed research articles from the American Dietetic Association's Evidence Analysis Library® database.

RESULTS

Quality rating frequency distributions indicate 43.3% of research reports were rated as positive, 50.1% neutral, and 6.6% as negative. Multinomial logistic regression results showed that while both funding source and type of research design are significant predictors of quality ratings (χ2 = 118.99, p≤0.001), the model's usefulness in predicting overall research report quality is little better than chance. Compared to research reports with government funding, those not acknowledging any funding sources, followed by studies with University/hospital funding were more likely to receive neutral vs positive quality ratings, OR = 1.85, P <0.001 and OR = 1.54, P<0.001, respectively and those that did not report funding were more likely to receive negative quality ratings (OR = 4.97, P<0.001). After controlling for research design, industry funded research reports were no more likely to receive a neutral or negative quality rating than those funded by government sources.

CONCLUSION

Research report quality cannot be accurately predicted from the funding source after controlling for research design. Continued vigilance to evaluate the quality of all research regardless of the funding source and to further understand other factors that affect quality ratings are warranted.

[The support of National Natural Science Foundation of China prompts the progress and development of basic research of dental and craniofacial research: a 25 years review]

OBJECTIVE

To investigate the effect of National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) on the progress of dental research from 1986 to 2010.

METHODS

The data regarding the NSFC allocated to dental and craniofacial research from 1986 to 2010 were collected. Total expenses and numbers of the majority of programs and the situation of completed program finished in recent 7 years were provided.

RESULTS

From 1986 to 2010, a total of 922 projects and 204 401 thousands Chinese Yuan supported by NSFC were allocated to dental research. The detailed allocations were as follows: general program (564), young scientists fund (258), regional fund (40), key program (11), national science fund for distinguished young scholars (5), major international (regional) joint research program (1), others (43). The grants of talent training increased dramatically. Taking the projects (307) completed between 2003 and 2009 for example, 307 papers were published in Science Citation Index (SCI) included journals and 1049 papers were published on Chinese journals. By the time of completion of the projects, 39 post-doctoral students, 590 students for PhD degree and 670 students for Master degree had been trained.

CONCLUSIONS

Over the past 25 years, the continuous increase of NSF on dental research has led to substantial achievement, resulting in great progress of dental oral-cranio-facial research.