These measures require limited labour and require no foregone benefits but lead to substantially increased benefits within catchment populations.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to estimate hospital catchment populations, as individuals may not access the nearest facility, and local access issues (geography, socio-economics, treatment-seeking behaviour) make it difficult to develop a standardised definition.
The distributions of local cases presenting to the facilities we studied in Fajara and Brikama broadly reflected those of the catchment populations, and essentially indicates that some transmission persists in many of these coastal communities, although some clustering might be identified with more intensive sampling.
The datasets, from eight endemic sites, consist of retrospectively assembled data on paediatric admissions presenting from pre-defined catchment populations with clearly defined addresses to selected hospitals within 20km of their home, and where diagnosis was supported by detailed clinical examination and parasitology (see Appendix S1 for more details).
Clusters were the villages (catchment populations) of individual CHWs.
However, the assumption of similar incidences in the two catchment populations can be disputed.
NHS facilities showed higher technical and scale efficiency variations between small and large catchment populations.
However, variations in catchment populations and definition of specialized care allow only rough comparisons of trends.
The catchment populations for the sites will include a diversity of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural groups.
The hospitals serve varying catchment populations and are within 40 km of one another.
Hospitals often lack clear indications of the catchment populations to which such generalizations are to be made.
