The aim of the article is to compare health system outcomes in the BRICS countries, assess the trends of their changes in 2000−2017, and verify whether they are in any way correlated with the economic context. The indicators considered were: nominal and per capita current health expenditure, government health expenditure, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, GDP growth, unemployment, inflation, and composition of GDP. The study covered five countries of the BRICS group over a period of 18 years. We decided to characterize countries covered with a dataset of selected indicators describing population health status, namely: life expectancy at birth, level of immunization, infant mortality rate, maternal mortality ratio, and tuberculosis case detection rate. We constructed a unified synthetic measure depicting the performance of individual health systems in terms of their outcomes with a single numerical value. Descriptive statistical analysis of quantitative traits consisted of the arithmetic mean (xsr), standard deviation (SD), and, where needed, the median. The normality of the distribution of variables was tested with the Shapiro-Wilk test. Spearman's rho and Kendall tau rank coefficients were used for correlation analysis between measures. The correlation analyses have been supplemented with factor analysis. We found that the best results in terms of health care system performance were recorded in Russia, China, and Brazil. India and South Africa are noticeably worse. However, the entire group performs visibly worse than the developed countries. The health system outcomes appeared to correlate on a statistically significant scale with health expenditures per capita, governments involvement in health expenditures, GDP per capita, and industry share in GDP; however, these correlations are relatively weak, with the highest strength in the case of government's involvement in health expenditures and GDP per capita. Due to weak correlation with economic background, other factors may play a role in determining health system outcomes in BRICS countries. More research should be recommended to find them and determine to what extent and how exactly they affect health system outcomes.

No abstract

No abstract

Introduction: Pain, while undertaking medical rescue operations, is a common complication of injuries or a symptom of disease entities of internal medicine. Equipping emergency medical teams with painkillers from various groups, gives broad opportunities to fight pain at the pre-hospital stage. The manner of using medicines is regulated by law in the form of an executive regulation to the Act on State Emergency Medical Services, which specifies the type and route of their administration. When undertaking analgesic treatment, one should be aware of the contraindications to the use of individual medications, possible complications of their use, and methods of combining analgesics and co-analgesics as part of multimodal analgesia. The consequence of using medicines may be their impact on the work of the circulatory and respiratory systems, hence it is necessary to observe the patient’s cardiopulmonary stability during medical emergency operations at the call site, during transport and in the Hospital Emergency Department. The aim: This article aims to systematize the knowledge of painkillers available to the paramedic and methods of assessing pain intensity according to the following scales: numerical, verbal, visual-analog and picture for pediatric patients with whom it is possible to make logical contact. Conclusions: 1. Basic emergency teams are equipped with drugs from the following groups: nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, non-opioid analgesics and opioid analgesics. Thanks to them, it is possible to effectively and noticeably reduce pain at the stage of providing medical emergency services. 2. Despite properly undertaken pain therapy with available means and methods, it may not be possible to completely eliminate pain and clearly determine its etiology at the pre-hospital stage. 3. Available scales allow proper assessment of pain intensity in both pediatric and adult patients. 4. In complex cases, pain should not go away, it is necessary to use multimodal analgesia by combining analgesics of different groups, or to include in analgesic therapy co-analgesics, which, due to the weakening of the impact of a potential cause of pain, may determine the effectiveness of therapy. 5. Establishing the etiology of pain due to the numerous potential pathologies that cause it requires careful assessment of the patient at the stage of providing medical emergency services and the implementation of a full and properly conducted physical examination.

No abstract