BACKGROUND: E-Delphi is an online method widely used in health and social research to strengthen decision-making processes and reach consensus on developing guidelines for health services.
OBJECTIVE: The e-Delphi technique was designed to formulate and appraise a set of criterion-referenced guidelines for women\'s health concerns of mineworkers at a selected coal mine in Mpumalanga, South Africa.
METHODS: The University Learning Management System\'s discussion forum was customised to suit the characteristics of e-Delphi as the second phase of a primary study on the formulation of guidelines for women\'s health concerns. Six purposively sampled experts with extensive experience in Occupational Health and in Women\'s Health participated. Online engagements on the formulation and appraisal of the guidelines for women\'s health concerns took 7 weeks, divided into four phases as preparatory, exploratory, consensus and refinement. From the experts\' inputs, guidelines were drafted. Experts were invited to evaluate the guidelines by using a 7-point Likert scale with AGREE II criteria. Consensus was reached in two e-rounds.
RESULTS: Eight guidelines were formulated, appraised and adopted as: change management, control of hazardous environments, suitable psychosocial working environment, provision of health care service, uphold human dignity and adherence to human rights, effective measures for safety participation compliance, accessible, available and relevant on-site health care services and hope and resilience. Each guideline has rationale, operational strategies and anticipated outcomes.
CONCLUSIONS: E-Delphi platform used various tools to deliberate on the process of guidelines formulation and appraisal. The platfor.

This article examines the provision of voluntary hospital facilities for injured workers in the mining valleys of Edwardian South Wales. It considers the co-operation and conflict that characterized efforts to establish hospitals, and examines the attitudes and activities of workers, employers, and other interested groups. Despite certain instances of disagreement and conflict, this article demonstrates the significant levels of co-operation and consensus that characterized the efforts of employers and workers to provide communities with hospital facilities. This co-operation was perhaps surprising considering the bitter industrial conflict and social unrest of that period. The article uses this material to question assertions that hospitals reflect the social and political milieus of the communities in which they were situated and argues that the social relations produced by hospital provision sometimes coincided with wider social and industrial relations, but at other times differed from them or transcended them. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that the co-operation between employers and workers in the provision of hospitals in Edwardian South Wales did not stabilize social and industrial relations in the way that historians of associational voluntarism in other contexts have found.

Ecological studies have acquired a bad reputation as weak scientific studies suffering from the ecological fallacy and many intractable limitations of data and method. In order to reduce these problems, it is suggested that analyses be focused on specific populations-at-risk, diseases, risk factors and places. In addition, seven guidelines are suggested which will limit the possibility of false positive results and provide the best clues for expensive, follow-up research. These guidelines are testing to make sure that the results are consistent across different times, places and methods. The guidelines were applied to finding the best clues for occupational-related cancers among white males aged 35-64 in the State of Illinois during 1950-1975. The most interesting clue found was that most coal mining areas in Illinois during the late 1960s and 1970s manifested the highest cancer mortality rates of trachea, bronchus, and lung and among the highest rates of increase of this type of cancer. This finding was unexpected because many studies have shown low lung cancer rates among coal miners.

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