ABSTRACT
Background: This study argues that the gender of a nurse could give patients the emotional and psychological support they need in their healing process. Nonetheless, in many developing countries, these intricate preferences of patients are usually ignored due to poor staffing and logistical capacities of health facilities. As a contribution to this professional and operation gap, this paper explores patients' preference for nurses' gender in health care at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Ghana. The paper further explores the importance of these preferences to the delivery of patient-centred care in Ghana and across Africa. Objective: The paper has two specific objectives: (a) to explore patients' preferences for the gender of nurses who attend to them while on admission; and (b) to find out the range of factors that inform these preferences. Methods: Qualitative exploratory descriptive design was used to select adult patients who were not seriously ill and nursed by male and female nurses at the medical and surgical wards of the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Ghana for at least 5 days from January to March 2017 and before their discharge. Participants were recruited using purposive sampling technique. A semi-structured interview guide was used to elicit information from 14 participants after seeking their written informed consent. The data were analysed using content analysis. Results: Two major themes emerged. These were: the Preferred Gender of a Nurse in Nursing Care and the Reasons for the Preference or no Preference for Nurses' Gender in Nursing Care. Under each of these themes, the associated aspects were also discussed. Patients had varying preference for a particular nurse during care but gender was not particularly significant in patients' preference for nurses. Majority of the participants emphasized their preference for nurses with professional expertise and good virtues to determine a preferred nurse and both genders of nurses can possess these qualities. However, nurses of the same gender as the patient were preferred for intimate procedures to ensure privacy and satisfaction. Conclusion: The gender of a nurse is not on top of the preferences list of patients in the study context. This may be attributed to the long-term practice that the participants have not had the chance to be choosing a preferred nurse's gender, so most patients are tolerant and familiar with both male and female nurses. Instead, patients' preferences are determined by the performance and quality of service provided by nurses. Age, maturity and social connections were also found to influence patients' preferences.
ABSTRACT
This article interrogates the spatial, economic, and cultural underpinnings of traditional retailscapes in sub-Saharan Africa to understand how they intersect with contemporary urban planning policies. It does so by deploying a multi-step investigation of the issues from four perspectives: transportation corridors, spheres of influence, centrality, and observed spatial patterns - each leading us to connections between retail spaces and planning of African cities. Our analyses of 22 traditional satellite markets in Kumasi are distilled into four key findings. First, these markets emerge along, and at the intersection of, intra- and inter-urban road networks as a means of granting local access to indigenous goods and services. Second, the spatial distribution and spheres of influence of the markets partly support Christaller's hypothesis regarding the willingness of people to travel far distances to access higher-order goods and services. The hypothesis fails, however, to recognize that some traditional markets can still have high spheres of influence without providing higher-order goods and services because they constitute vital nodes in the rural-urban food networks. Third, we find a spatial clustering of these markets, suggesting agglomerative tendencies among the markets. Finally, we argue that the observed spatio-social patterns of Kumasi's retailscape only make sense if they are situated within the city's modernist urban planning imaginaries. Specifically, the city's retailscape embodies ongoing placemaking strategies, which involve the expropriation of urban spaces from traders to modernize the cityscape.