Availability of doctors at primary health centres of Andhra Pradesh, India.

BACKGROUND: Availability of doctors at primary health centres (PHCs) is a major concern. We measured the operational availability of doctors in PHCs and examined the effect of residential distance and private practice. METHODS: Thirty-six health centres, consisting of six randomly selected PHCs from six purposively chosen districts in Andhra Pradesh were studied. Cross-sectional data on residential distance, private practice and attendance pattern of 38 operationally available medical officers were analysed. RESULTS: About 80% of doctors residing within 20 km attended their PHC on all 6 days of a week, compared with only 33% for those staying >40 km away. Among those staying >20 km away from their PHC, the odds of absenteeism by privately practising doctors was 3-24 times more than for those not practising privately. CONCLUSION: Residential distance seems to affect the operational availability of doctors. Private practice by doctors living within 20 km from the PHC does not seem to affect their operational availability. However, private practice by doctors staying >20 km away from their PHC may affect their availability.

Investigating the microenvironments of inhomogeneous soft materials with multiple particle tracking.

We develop a multiple particle tracking technique for making precise, localized measurements of the mechanical microenvironments of inhomogeneous materials. Using video microscopy, we simultaneously measure the Brownian dynamics of roughly one hundred fluorescent tracer particles embedded in a complex medium and interpret their motions in terms of local viscoelastic response. To help overcome the inherent statistical limitations due to the finite imaging volume and limited imaging times, we develop statistical techniques and analyze the distribution of particle displacements in order to make meaningful comparisons of individual particles and thus characterize the diversity and properties of the microenvironments. The ability to perform many local measurements simultaneously allows more precise measurements even in systems that evolve in time. We show several examples of inhomogeneous materials to demonstrate the flexibility of the technique and learn new details of the mechanics of the microenvironments that small particles explore. This technique extends other microrheological methods to allow simultaneous measurements of large numbers of probe particles, enabling heterogeneous samples to be studied more effectively.