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There has been increasing interest in enhancing accountability in health care. As such, several methods have been developed to compare the quality of home care services. These comparisons can be problematic if...
In recent years out-of-hours primary care in the Netherlands has changed from practice-based to large-scale cooperatives. The purpose of this study is to determine patient satisfaction with current out-of-hour...
Several HIV prevention programs use data on condom sales and survey-based data on condom prevalence to monitor progress. However, such indicators are not always consistent. This paper aims to explain these inc...
Pain is highly prevalent among older adults, but little is known about how patient involvement in medical decision-making may play a role in limiting its occurrence or severity. The purpose of this study was t...
Chronic non-cancer pain is a common problem that is often accompanied by psychiatric comorbidity and disability. The effectiveness of a multi-disciplinary pain management program was tested in a 3 month before...
Few studies report on the effect of organizational factors facilitating transfer between primary and tertiary care hospitals either within an integrated health care system or outside it. In this paper, we repo...
While significant strides have been made in health research, the incorporation of research evidence into healthcare decision-making has been marginal. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of how...
The evidence base of clinical interventions in paediatric hospitals of developing countries has not been formally assessed. We performed this study to determine the proportion of evidence-based therapeutic int...
Conventional total hip replacement (THR) may be felt to carry too high a risk of failure over a patient's lifetime, especially in young people. There is increasing interest in metal on metal hip resurfacing ar...
A number of approaches have been used to grade levels of evidence and the strength of recommendations. The use of many different approaches detracts from one of the main reasons for having explicit approaches:...
The aim of this study was to describe practice activity trends among oral and maxillofacial surgeons in Australia over time.
Priority setting is one of the most difficult issues facing hospitals because of funding restrictions and changing patient need. A deadly communicable disease outbreak, such as the Severe Acute Respiratory Syn...
Preventive home visits to elderly people by public health nurses aim to maintain or improve the functional status of elderly and reduce the use of institutional care services. A number of trials that investiga...
Direct admission to Coronary Care Unit (CCU) on hospital arrival can be considered as a good proxy for adequate management in patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI), as it has been associated with bet...
This work has investigated under what conditions confidence intervals around the differences in mean costs from a cluster RCT are suitable for estimation using a commonly used cluster-adjusted bootstrap in pre...
Self-reported information has commonly been used to monitor mammography utilization across populations and time periods. However, longitudinal investigations regarding the prevalence and determinants of incons...
A systematic review identified a range of methods, which can influence response rates. However, analysis specific to a healthcare setting, and in particular, involving people expected to be poor responders, wa...
Postal questionnaires are an economical and simple method of data collection for research purposes but are subject to non-response bias. Several studies have explored the effect of monetary and non-monetary in...
Smoking in pregnancy is a public health problem and effective methods for reducing this are required. Although nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) is effective for smoking cessation in non-pregnant people, ther...
The delivery of technology-enhanced home care is growing in most industrialized countries. The objective of our study was to document, from the patient's perspective, how the level of user-friendliness of medi...
The quality control of oral anticoagulant therapy (OAT) during the initiation and maintenance treatment is generally poor. Physicians' ordering of OAT (especially fluindione and warfarin) can be improved by dose ...
It is not currently known what is the patient's viewpoint of a "good" physician. We set out to define patient's priorities regarding different physician's attributes in 3 domains important in medical care.
Hospitals and regional health authorities must set priorities in the face of resource constraints. Decision-makers seek practical ways to set priorities fairly in strategic planning, but find limited guidance ...
Patients' trust in physicians and in the medical profession is vital for a successful patient-physician relationship. Trust is especially salient in critical medical situations, such as serious side-effects, h...
We describe a simple approach we used to identify barriers and tailor an intervention to improve pharmacological management of hypertension and hypercholesterolaemia. We also report the results of a post hoc e...
The reduced number of hospital beds and an ageing population have resulted in growing demands for home nursing. We know very little about the comprehensive care of these patients. The objectives were to identi...
Traditional non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are a widely used class of therapy in the treatment of chronic pain and inflammation. The drugs are effective and can be relatively inexpensive thanks...
Patients hospitalized with community acquired pneumonia (CAP) have a substantial risk of death, but there is evidence that adherence to certain processes of care, including antibiotic administration within 8 h...
In 2002, the World Health Organization published a health system performance ranking for 191 member countries. The ranking was based on five indicators, with fixed weights common to all countries.
The improvement of the quality of the evidence used in treatment decision-making is especially important in the case of patients with complicated disease processes such as HIV/AIDS for which multiple treatment...
To update appropriateness ratings for carotid endarterectomy using the best clinical evidence and to develop a tool to audit the procedure's use.
Previous studies of methods to increase response rates on international postal surveys did not include providing return postage. We provided International Postage Vouchers – "Coupon-Réponse International" to c...
"Integrative health care" has become a common term to describe teams of health care providers working together to provide patient care. However this term has not been well-defined and likely means many differe...
Response rates to postal questionnaires are falling and this threatens the external validity of survey findings. We wanted to establish whether the incentive of being entered into a prize draw to win a persona...
Despite broad agreement on the necessity to improve quality of diabetic care through implementation of clinical guidelines, in Italy many people with diabetes still lack adequate care in general practice. In a...
It has been proposed that greater availability of primary medical care practitioners (GPs) contributes to better population health. We evaluated whether measures of the supply and structure of primary medical ...
This trial aims to investigate the effectiveness and cost implications of 'pharmaceutical care' provided by community pharmacists to elderly patients in the community. As the UK government has proposed that by...
The assessment of the impact of healthcare interventions may help commissioners of healthcare services to make optimal decisions. This can be particularly the case if the impact assessment relates to specific ...
We sought to develop a more reliable structured implicit chart review instrument for use in assessing the quality of care for chronic disease and to examine if ratings are more reliable for conditions in which...
The interface between primary care and specialist medical services is an important domain for health services research and policy. Of particular concern is optimising specialist services and the organisation o...
The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has produced guidelines on the early management of head injury. This study audits the process of the management of patients with head injury presenting at ...
The aim of this project was to assess whether outreach visits would improve the implementation of evidence based clinical practice in the area of falls reduction and stroke prevention in a residential care set...
Atrial fibrillation is a common cardiac dysrhythmia, particularly in the elderly. Recent studies have indicated a statistically significant seasonal component to atrial fibrillation hospitalizations.
Length of stay (LOS) is an important indicator of efficiency for inpatient care but it does not achieve an adequate performance if it is not adjusted for the case mix of the patients hospitalized during the pe...
In this study we examined the influence of type of insurance and the influence of managed care in particular, on the length of stay decisions physicians make and on variation in medical practice.
In the U.S. small-area health services research studies are often based on the hospital service areas (HSAs) defined by the Dartmouth Atlas of Healthcare project. These areas are based on the geographic origin...
Until recently, premarital examination for both men and women was a legal requirement before marriage in China. Researchers have carried out surveys of attendees' sexual activity, pregnancy and abortion before...
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is defined by symptoms and disability, has no confirmatory physical signs or characteristic laboratory abnormalities, and the etiology and pathophysiology remain unknown. Difficu...
Research has shown that many healthcare professionals have problems with guidelines as they would prefer to be given all relevent information relevent to decision-making rather than being told what they should...
Clinical practice guidelines are systematically developed statements designed to assist in patient and physician clinical decision making for specific clinical circumstances. In order to establish which guidel...
