Findings indicate that traditional and modern medicines will always be part of Ghanaian healthcare delivery and efforts should be made to integrate traditional practitioners into the national healthcare delivery system.
This article outlines the development of the assistant practitioner role within a primary care setting and the experiences of 5 trainee assistant practitioners undertaking a foundation degree in health and social care delivered by the University of Bolton. The article will examine the changes in staff skill mix within general practice, and how the assistant practitioner role aims to contribute to the efficacy of services, improve patient access, and continuity of care. Furthermore, it will explore how it is offering career progression for healthcare assistants, in line with the Skills for Health (2015) skills escalator. A focus group methodology was used to gather the views of the trainee assistant practitioners at the end of their university programme and about to enter their new role. They were asked to reflect on the benefits of their learning and competency development, considering how their role has changed and will change in the future.
This study evaluates appointment behavior for first well-child visits for first-born children and identifies factors that target infants at increased likelihood for missing their first pediatric appointment. Timely appointments were not scheduled for 10.3% of newborns; 20.1% of those scheduling did not keep the first appointment. Younger, less educated mothers who did not remember when they had learned about well-baby care, and mothers of infants born in the newborn intensive care unit were unlikely to schedule the appointment; young mothers learning about well care from friends or relatives and who chose a pediatrician without a previous prenatal visit were more likely to miss the child's first appointment. Prenatal pediatric visits as well as prenatal classes and written materials may improve compliance with the first well-child appointment.
It is important that the mental wellbeing of the healthcare workforce is attended to by managers. While many research workers have looked at issues of occupational stress and burnout, fewer have considered the mental wellbeing of staff. In this paper, we report on the findings from a larger survey of mental wellbeing, compassion fatigue and burnout in health and social care professionals. Here we focus on the findings for assistant practitioners (APs). Some 45 APs took part in our questionnaire survey. They were all completing their foundation degree at the University of Bolton. The group were all quite experienced and most worked full-time. The average score on the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale for our group was 22.96, which is significantly below the average for the general population in the North West of England of 27.70. Only 3 out of 45 APs had ‘high wellbeing’, while 7 out of 45 had ‘low wellbeing’. Scores for trust were also quite low. Burnout was more of a problem than compassion fatigue for this group of practitioners, with the highest score on the item: ‘I have frequently felt weak, tired or rundown as a result of my work.’ While this was only a small study, and as such needs to be treated with some caution, it does reinforce the need to think about the wellbeing of the workforce and the necessity for managers to provide support for APs in their roles.
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