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National levels of personal health-care access and quality can be approximated by measuring mortality rates from causes that should not be fatal in the presence of effective medical care (ie, amenable mortality). Previous analyses of mortality amenable to health care only focused on high-income countries and faced several methodological challenges. In the present analysis, we use the highly standardised cause of death and risk factor estimates generated through the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) to improve and expand the quantification of personal health-care access and quality for 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2015. We mapped the most widely used list of causes amenable to personal health care developed by Nolte and McKee to 32 GBD causes. We accounted for variations in cause of death certification and misclassifications through the extensive data standardisation processes and redistribution algorithms developed for GBD. To isolate the effects of personal health-care access and quality, we risk-standardised cause-specific mortality rates for each geography-year by removing the joint effects of local environmental and behavioural risks, and adding back the global levels of risk exposure as estimated for GBD 2015. We employed principal component analysis to create a single, interpretable summary measure–the Healthcare Quality and Access (HAQ) Index–on a scale of 0 to 100. The HAQ Index showed strong convergence validity as compared with other health-system indicators, including health expenditure per capita (r=0·88), an index of 11 universal health coverage interventions (r=0·83), and human resources for health per 1000 (r=0·77). We used free disposal hull analysis with bootstrapping to produce a frontier based on the relationship between the HAQ Index and the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a measure of overall development consisting of income per capita, average years of education, and total fertility rates. This frontier allowed us to better quantify the maximum levels of personal health-care access and quality achieved across the development spectrum, and pinpoint geographies where gaps between observed and potential levels have narrowed or widened over time. Between 1990 and 2015, nearly all countries and territories saw their HAQ Index values improve; nonetheless, the difference between the highest and lowest observed HAQ Index was larger in 2015 than in 1990, ranging from 28·6 to 94·6. Of 195 geographies, 167 had statistically significant increases in HAQ Index levels since 1990, with South Korea, Turkey, Peru, China, and the Maldives recording among the largest gains by 2015. Performance on the HAQ Index and individual causes showed distinct patterns by region and level of development, yet substantial heterogeneities emerged for several causes, including cancers in highest-SDI countries; chronic kidney disease, diabetes, diarrhoeal diseases, and lower respiratory infections among middle-SDI countries; and measles and tetanus among lowest-SDI countries. While the global HAQ Index average rose from 40·7 (95% uncertainty interval, 39·0–42·8) in 1990 to 53·7 (52·2–55·4) in 2015, far less progress occurred in narrowing the gap between observed HAQ Index values and maximum levels achieved; at the global level, the difference between the observed and frontier HAQ Index only decreased from 21·2 in 1990 to 20·1 in 2015. If every country and territory had achieved the highest observed HAQ Index by their corresponding level of SDI, the global average would have been 73·8 in 2015. Several countries, particularly in eastern and western sub-Saharan Africa, reached HAQ Index values similar to or beyond their development levels, whereas others, namely in southern sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia, lagged behind what geographies of similar development attained between 1990 and 2015. This novel extension of the GBD Study shows the untapped potential for personal health-care access and quality improvement across the development spectrum. Amid substantive advances in personal health care at the national level, heterogeneous patterns for individual causes in given countries or territories suggest that few places have consistently achieved optimal health-care access and quality across health-system functions and therapeutic areas. This is especially evident in middle-SDI countries, many of which have recently undergone or are currently experiencing epidemiological transitions. The HAQ Index, if paired with other measures of health-system characteristics such as intervention coverage, could provide a robust avenue for tracking progress on universal health coverage and identifying local priorities for strengthening personal health-care quality and access throughout the world. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The architecture practice Brinkman & Van der Vlugt is mainly known for the world-famous Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam. The two architects also designed the Feyenoord football stadium and the standard Dutch telephone box, which was used for over 50 years. This publication is the first retrospective on this Rotterdam architecture firm. As pioneers of Nieuwe Bouwen, Brinkman & Van der Vlugt greatly impressed Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Richard Neutra with designs like the Van Nelle factory. This book is a contextual monograph on the firm, shedding new light on the origins of their work in a joyous International Style. They drew inspiration from their international travels and adapted this in the rapidly changing European city of the Interbellum, with Rotterdam as their main arena. The practice also designed complete interiors in association with firms like Gispen. Sonneveld House in Rotterdam is a fine example.

The Dutch second generation of Turkish and Moroccan origin is coming of age and making a transition from education to the labour market. This first publication of the TIES Project (Towards the Integration of the European Second Generation) studies the social situation and views of this ethnic group, drawing on the research carried out in Amsterdam and Rotterdam in 2006-07 among the Dutch-born children of immigrants from Turkey and Morocco and a comparison group of young people (age 18-35) whose parents were born in the Netherlands. This title is available in the OAPEN Library - http://www.oapen.org.

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is the most common endocrine disorder of reproductive-aged women. Much of the confusion surrounding PCOS diagnosis stems from the broad heterogeneity of symptomology experienced by women with PCOS. The diverse features of the syndrome have led to a number of diagnostic criteria over the years. This manuscript describes each of the current composite criteria and individually breaks down each component. The importance of accurate diagnosis for both clinical care and research is emphasized.

Background Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is the most common metabolic disorder among women of reproductive age. Many factors are involved in the development of PCOS, among which genetic predisposition is probably the main contributor that is also influenced by lifestyle and environmental factors. This study aims to determine the prevalence of PCOS in different continents based on Rotterdam, AES and NIH diagnostic criteria. Methods We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate the prevalence of polycystic ovary syndrome in women according to (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis) PRISMA guidelines. PubMed, Scopus, Science Direct, Web of Science and Google Scholar databases were comprehensively searched until February 2021 for relevant articles. Heterogeneity between the studies was assessed using the I 2 index. Begg and Mazumdar’s test was used to evaluate publication bias. Results A total of 35 studies with 12,365,646 subjects were retrieved. The mean age ranged from 10–45 years. Global prevalence of PCOS was 9.2% (95% CI: 6.8–12.5%) based on meta-analysis, our results showed that the global prevalence of PCOS was 5.5% (95% CI: 3.9–7.7%) based on NIH criteria, 11.5 (95% CI: 6.6–19.4) based on Rotterdam criteria, and 7.1% (95% CI: 2.3–20.2%) based on AES criteria. According to self-report subgroup analysis, the prevalence of PCOS was found to be 11% (95% CI: 5.2–21.8%). Conclusion Based on the results of the present study, the prevalence of PCOS in the world was 9.2% (95% CI: 6.8–12.5%). According to the results of the present study and the high prevalence of PCOS, especially in the Africa continent, it is necessary for health systems to implement measures to timely prevent and treat this syndrome.

Citizens and urban policy makers are experimenting with collaborative ways to tackle wicked urban issues, such as today’s sustainability challenges. In this article, we consider one particular way of collaboration in an experimental setting: Urban Living Labs (ULLs). ULLs are understood as spatially embedded sites for the co-creation of knowledge and solutions by conducting local experiments. As such, ULLs are supposed to offer an arena for reflexive, adaptive, and multi-actor learning environments, where new practices of self-organization and novel (infra-) structures can be tested within their real-world context. Yet, it remains understudied how the co-creation of knowledge and practices actually takes place within ULLs, and how co-creation unfolds their impacts. Hence, this paper focuses on co-creation dynamics in urban living labs, its associated learning and knowledge generation, and how these possibly contribute to urban sustainability transitions. We analyzed empirical data from a series of in-depth interviews and were actively involved with ULLs in the Rotterdam-The Hague region in the Netherlands. Our findings show five distinct types of co-creation elements that relate to specific dynamics of participation, facilitation, and organization. We conclude with a discussion on the ambivalent role of contextualized knowledge and the implications for sustainability transitions.

The neighborhood of Bloemhof in Rotterdam-South is often presented to be sinking because of soil subsidence. The City of Rotterdam makes use of participatory methods to involve a wide range of stakeholders in Bloemhof and to build consensus on how to deal with the subsiding neighborhood. However, what remains unknown is how civil society, civil servants, and subsidence policy programs actually make sense of subsidence. Therefore, we address the question: How do residents, civil servants, and policy programs make sense of subsidence in Bloemhof, Rotterdam-South? We followed an ethnographic approach, focusing on conversational interviews, events, and policy documents, to uncover the often taken-for-granted ways, unexamined assumptions, and consequences of how subsidence is performed differently across actors and domains. We present four main themes characterizing subsidence sensemaking of residents, civil servants, and policy programs in Bloemhof, showing how (1) most only notice discursive cues of subsidence, while relying on remote sensing tools to make subsidence materially visible (cues of subsidence); (2) how the municipal subsidence efforts in Bloemhof are publicly communicated as open-ended, while internally enacted as resistant to political debate (uncertainty and open-endedness); (3) how subsidence is made sense of as temporally distant, yet enacted as requiring immediate responses (subsidence temporalities); and (4) how municipal subsidence efforts are tinkered with to address other matters of concern (institutional tinkering). With this analysis we contribute to sensemaking theory, and hope to attune practitioners’ sensibilities to reflexivity, by showing how particular science-based sensemaking enacts specific realities of subsidence that constrain the enactive capacity of other meanings (i.e., of residents). Broadening the policy space for multiple meanings may help us better connect with diverse (i.e., social, economic, public) domains, human/non-human actors, and material concerns when governing environmental change, in Bloemhof and beyond.