Meet the editor

Ayşe Emel Önal graduated from the Istanbul Faculty of Medicine, Istanbul University, in 1995. In 1996, she became a public health specialist at the same university, followed by positions as a professor in 2011, head of the Department of Environmental Health in 2013, and head of the Department of Public Health in 2016. Her main research areas are communicable diseases, chronic non-communicable diseases, epidemiology, adolescent

and youth health, gerontology, and environmental health. Dr. Önal has nearly 300 national and international

## Contents



Preface

Access to health care is the ability to receive health services for the prevention, early detection, appropriate treatment, and tertiary prevention and care of diseases, disorders, and other conditions that affect health. For health care to be accessible, it must be affordable and able to protect and improve health. Today, it may not be possible to access health services in many parts of the world and in different settlements even within the same country. While this is common enough in Third World countries, it can also occur in developing and highly developed countries in certain circumstances

Governments, institutions, and health professionals are responsible for providing adequate health care. Access to health services becomes difficult in the face of economic problems, conflicts, global climate change, internal and external migrations, beliefs, and so on. This book discusses both barriers to and opportunities for accessing health services. If the barriers are poverty, illiteracy, and false beliefs, the opportunities may be organization, communication, stratification of health care, and categorization and training of health workers to reach homes at one end and to practice personalized

Section I, "Environment – Health Relationship and Access to Health Services", includes two chapters: Chapter 1: "Impact of Poverty on Health" and Chapter 2: "Climate Change,

Section II, "Access to Health Services for Important Health Problems", includes four chapters that discuss common diseases that kill, disable, and cause the most workday loss: Chapter 3: "Funding of Oncology Benefits by Medical Schemes, South Africa: A Focus on Breast and Cervical Cancer", Chapter 4: "Healthcare Services for the Physically Challenged Persons in Africa: Challenges and Way Forward", Chapter 5: "The Urgency of Access to Men-Centered Mental Healthcare Services to Address Men's Sensitive Issues in the Communities of South Africa" and Chapter 6: "The 4H and 4T Pediatric Early Acute Support in the Deteriorating Child: Competent Staff Instead Experts Facing the New Threats, and New Approaches Can Reduce

Section III, "Barriers and Opportunities to Access to Health Care and Universal Health Coverage", includes three chapters: Chapter 7: "The Road to Universal Coverage by the End of 2022, the Moroccan Challenge", Chapter 8: "Poor Health Care Access in Nigeria: A Function of Fundamental Misconceptions and Misconstruction of the Health System" and Chapter 9: "Home Visitation by Community Health Workers".

Section IV, "Artificial Intelligence and Telemedicine in Health Care", includes the final chapter: Chapter 10: "Reinforcing Positive Cognitive States with Machine Learning:

medicine at the other. This book includes ten chapters over four sections.

Conflict, and Contagion: Emerging Threats to Global Public Health".

Mortality – Experience in Guatemala".

An Experimental Modeling for Preventive Healthcare".

such as disasters.
