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Linked population health data are increasingly used in epidemiological studies. If data items are reported on more than one dataset, data linkage can reduce the under-ascertainment associated with many populat...
Limited resources, whether public or private, demand prioritisation among competing needs to maximise productivity. With a substantial increase in the number of reported HIV cases, little work has been done to...
Almost one-third of Norwegian women aged 25–69 years invited to have a Pap smear do not attend during the recommended period, and thus constitute a population with high-risk of cervical cancer (CC). Since the ...
The impact of immigration on health services utilisation has been analysed by several studies performed in countries with lower levels of immigration than Spain. These studies indicate that health services uti...
Patients with chronic conditions require frequent care visits. Problems can arise during several parts of the patient visit that decrease efficiency, making it difficult to effectively care for high volumes of...
Studies published in non-English languages are systematically missing in systematic reviews of growth and quality of economic evaluations of health care. The aims of this study were: to characterize German eva...
The availability of medical human resource supply is a growing concern for rural and remote communities in many countries. In the last decade, various telehealth experiences in Canada have highlighted the pote...
Clinical performance targets are intended to improve patient outcomes in chronic disease through quality improvement, but evidence of an association between multiple target attainment and patient outcomes in r...
Collaboration between general practitioners (GPs) and specialists has been the focus of many collaborative care projects during the past decade. Unfortunately, quite a number of these projects failed. This rai...
The aim of the LIFELAX randomised controlled trial (diet and lifestyle vs. laxatives in the management of chronic constipation) is to develop and evaluate a cost effective intervention to promote diet and lifesty...
Smoking in pregnancy remains a public health challenge. Nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) is effective for smoking cessation in non-pregnant people, but because women metabolise nicotine and cotinine much fas...
Interest in assessing the value of health-care services in Germany has considerably increased since the foundation of the Institut für Qualität und Wirtschaftlichkeit im Gesundheitswesen, IQWiG (Institute for ...
In sub-Saharan Africa, the availability and accessibility of oral health services are seriously constrained and the provision of essential oral care is limited. Reports from the region show a very low utilizat...
An estimated 350 adults develop severe, but potentially reversible respiratory failure in the UK annually. Current management uses intermittent positive pressure ventilation, but barotrauma, volutrauma and oxy...
Research that examines the quality of home health care is complex because no gold standard exists for measuring adverse outcomes, and because the patient and clinician populations are highly heterogeneous. The...
With the introduction of ICD-10 throughout Canada, it is important to ensure that Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) comorbidities employed in risk adjustment methods remain valid and robust. Therefore, we deve...
The aim of this paper is to show how researchers balance between scientific rigour and localisation in conducting pragmatic trial research. Our case is the Quattro Study, a pragmatic trial on the effectiveness...
The purpose of this study was to describe the patterns of antidiabetic medication use and the cost of testing supplies in Canada using information collected by Saskatchewan's Drug Plan (DP) in 2001. The diabet...
Associations between symptom experience and mortality have rarely been investigated. One study has suggested that the number of symptoms people experience may be an important predictor of mortality. This novel...
In countries with low hepatitis A (HA) endemicity, infected food handlers are the source of most reported foodborne outbreaks. In Canada, accessible data repositories of infected food handler incidents are not...
Since 1994, Brazil has developed a primary care system based on multidisciplinary teams which include not only a physician and a nurse, but also 4–6 lay community health workers. This system now consists of 26...
Collaboration between general practitioners (GPs) and specialists has been the focus of many collaborative care projects during the past decade. Unfortunately, quite a number of these projects failed. This rai...
Poor adherence is the main barrier to the effectiveness of HIV medication. The objective of this study was to explore and conceptualize patterns and difficulties in physicians' work with patients' adherence to...
Changing immigration trends pose new challenges for the UK's open access health service and there is considerable speculation that migrants from resource-poor countries place a disproportionate burden on servi...
Acupuncture is a frequently used but controversial adjunct to the treatment of chronic low back pain (LBP). Acupuncture is now considered to be effective for chronic LBP and health care systems are pressured t...
Smoking is strongly associated with disadvantage and is an important contributor to inequalities in health. Smoking cessation services have been implemented in the UK targeting disadvantaged smokers, but there...
In the UK, all ethnic minority groups have higher rates of diabetes than the general population. Although there have been a number of projects to assess diabetic care amongst minority ethnic groups in the Unit...
Literature on difficult doctor-patient relationships has focused on the "difficult patient." Our objective was to determine physician and practice characteristics associated with greater physician-reported fru...
Low income appears to be associated with a higher prevalence of diabetes and diabetes related complications, however, little is known about how income influences access to diabetes care. The objective of the p...
The regulations of the Quality Management System (QMS) implementation in health care organizations were approved by the Lithuanian Ministry of Health in 1998. Following the above regulations, general managers ...
This commentary discusses the need for, and the advantages of, a more concise, revised definition of the field of health services research. It argues for a definition that includes not only the topics on which...
To explain why rates of colorectal cancer (CRC) screening including fecal occult blood testing (FOBT), flexible sigmoidoscopy (FS), colonoscopy (CS), and barium enema (BE), are low, this study assessed determi...
To understand why treatment referral rates for ESRF are lower in Ireland than in other European countries, an investigation of factors influencing general practitioner referral of patients developing ESRF was ...
Physicians house calls to patients have been declining in many countries of the world. The objective of this study was to describe the patterns of utilization of house call services provided by SOS doctors in ...
Postal questionnaires are commonly used to collect data for health studies, but non-response reduces study sample sizes and can introduce bias. Finding ways to increase the proportion of questionnaires returne...
While there is interest in measuring the satisfaction of patients discharged from psychiatric hospitals, it might be important to determine whether surveys of psychiatric patients should employ generic or psyc...
The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic threw the world into turmoil during the first half of 2003. Many subsequent papers have addressed its impact on health service utilization, but few have co...
This study aimed to investigate groups of patients with a relatively homogenous health status to evaluate the degree to which use of the Australian hospital system is affected by socio-economic status, locatio...
To describe hospitalisations of nursing home (NH) residents in Germany during their last months of life.
Cost-effectiveness acceptability curves (CEACs) describe the probability that a new treatment or intervention is cost-effective. The net benefit regression framework (NBRF) allows cost-effectiveness analysis t...
The main objective of this study is to establish a benchmark for referral rates in rural Niger so as to allow interpretation of routine referral data to assess the performance of the referral system in Niger.
2002 marked the first time that the rate of hospital spending in the United States outpaced the overall health care spending rate of growth since 1991. As hospital spending continues to grow and as reimburseme...
The Two-Week Rule (TWR) was introduced to ensure that all patients with a suspected colorectal cancer (CRC) saw a hospital specialist within 14 days of an urgent GP referral. Guidelines were available to GPs t...
Over the last decades there has been an increasing pressure on the acute psychiatric wards in Norway. The major contributor to psychiatric acute admissions at the University Hospital of North Norway in the cit...
A few studies have investigated differences in elective procedure rates across small and medium sized referral regions. The purposes of this study are to investigate differences in revascularizations across 11...
Organised stroke care saves lives and reduces disability. A clinical pathway might be a form of organised stroke care, but the evidence for the effectiveness of this model of care is limited.
Children with congenital hearing impairment benefit from early detection and management of their hearing loss. These and related considerations led to the recommendation of universal newborn hearing screening....
The science of syndromic surveillance is still very much in its infancy. While a number of syndromic surveillance systems are being evaluated in the US, very few have had success thus far in predicting an infe...
Poor compliance with antihypertensive medication is assumed to be an important reason for unsatisfactory control of blood pressure. Poor compliance is difficult to detect. Each method of measuring compliance h...
Reviews of peer-reviewed health studies have highlighted problems with their methodological quality. As published health studies form the basis of many clinical decisions including evaluation and provisions of...
