Access to pathology and laboratory medicine services: a crucial gap
Paper cited by one term page, indexed on Europe PMC as PubMed record 29550029 and published in The Lancet; the citing page links this DOI, which is how the record was matched.
Overview
As global efforts accelerate to implement the Sustainable Development Goals and, in particular, universal health coverage, access to high-quality and timely pathology and laboratory medicine (PALM) services will be needed to support health-care systems that are tasked with achieving these goals. This access will be most challenging to achieve in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs), which have a disproportionately large share of the global burden of disease but a disproportionately low share of global health-care resources, particularly PALM services. In this first in a Series of three papers on PALM in LMICs, we describe the crucial and central roles of PALM services in the accurate diagnosis and detection of disease, informing prognosis and guiding treatment, contributing to disease screening, public health surveillance and disease registries, and supporting medical-legal systems. We also describe how, even though data are sparse, these services are of both insufficient scope and inadequate quality to play their key role in health-care systems in LMICs. Lastly, we identify four key barriers to the provision of optimal PALM services in resource-limited settings: insufficient human resources or workforce capacity, inadequate education and training, inadequate infrastructure, and insufficient quality, standards, and accreditation.
Indexed on Europe PMC as PubMed record 29550029 (DOI 10.1016/s0140-6736(18)30458-6). Matched by DOI alone: one term page cites this DOI among its external links (the pages are listed under Related), and this page was written so that the citation resolves inside OnCo. No figure has been checked by an editor.
One term page on OnCo cites this paper by its DOI; this record gives the citation a page of its own so a reader can follow it without leaving OnCo. Read the abstract above alongside the citing page listed under Related; the record was created automatically from the Europe PMC entry and its figures have not been checked by hand.
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