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 such as disasters.

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

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

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 Mortality – Experience in Guatemala".

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: An Experimental Modeling for Preventive Healthcare".

Global and regional income inequality, wars caused by unshared energy, air, and water, and soil pollution caused by fossil fuels, global climate change, natural disasters, and other factors increase acute and chronic health problems in the world and make it difficult to access health services. Economic deprivations prevent access to water, sanitation, and hygiene, and increase food insecurity and deaths from infections. Economic deprivation also weakens health infrastructure. Therefore, it becomes difficult both to receive preventive health services and appropriate treatment. This book opens new horizons in accessing health services.

I would like to thank our esteemed authors for their excellent contributions and the staff at IntechOpen for selecting me as editor and for their invaluable assistance throughout the publication process.

#### **Ayşe Emel Önal**

**1**

Section 1

Environment – Health

Relationship and Access

to Health Services

Professor, MD, Public Health Specialist, Istanbul University, Istanbul Medical Faculty, Istanbul, Türkiye

### Section 1
