Tag Archives: journal club

This week in journal club we will read Improving the Measurement of Maternal Mortality: The Sisterhood Method Revisited by Merdad et al. A method I am quite fond of.

The week journal club will read Incorporating Loss to Follow-up in Estimates of Survival Among HIV-Infected Individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa Enrolled in Antiretroviral Therapy Programs by Vergut et al.

This week’s paper Effect of the Newhints home-visits intervention on neonatal mortality rate and care practices in Ghana: a cluster randomised controlled trial, by Kirkwood et al. Cluster randomized trials and meta-analysis, a good combination to put new results in the context of the old.

This week in journal club we are reading something that I’m not going to name, because it says “do not cite or distribute without permission” on the top of the paper. This secret paper sounds interesting, maybe I can tell you about it some day.

We’ve selected a locally grown paper for discussion in journal club this week, India’s Janani Suraksha Yojana, a conditional cash transfer programme to increase births in health facilities: an impact evaluation, by Lim et al, with a focus on the methods: the paper has “used three analytical approaches (matching, with-versus-without comparison, and differences in differences) to assess the effect of JSY on antenatal care, in-facility births, and perinatal, neonatal, and maternal deaths.”

This week I had to draft a fellow to present, so I picked something short to read: Digital Epidemiology by Salathé et al.

This week in journal club we will take on yet another locally produced paper, Nets, spray or both? The effectiveness of insecticide-treated nets and indoor residual spraying in reducing malaria morbidity and child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa.

TL/DR? both.

Or as the authors put it: “these findings suggest that greater reductions in malaria morbidity and health gains for children may be achieved with ITNs and IRS combined beyond the protection offered by IRS or ITNs alone.”

This week brings another locally grown reading to our journal club, Algorithms for enhancing public health utility of national causes-of-death data. As they say in the text:

While some practitioners may object to the term “garbage code” as pejorative, alternative terms have not yet caught on in the literature. We follow this practice and use the term garbage code (GC) to refer to all deaths assigned to codes that should be redistributed to enhance the validity of public health analysis.

This week’s journal club selection is Performance of Health Workers in the Management of Seriously Sick Children at a Kenyan Tertiary Hospital: Before and after a Training Intervention by Irimu et al. That sounds hard to quantify, so I wonder how they did it.