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We were commissioned to carry out three health assessments in urban areas of Dublin in Ireland. We required an epidemiologically robust method that could collect data rapidly and inexpensively. We were dealing...
Recognising that household interviews may produce biased estimates of health services utilisation, we examined for under- and over-reporting of hospitalisation episodes in three recent, consecutive population-...
A significant proportion of trial participants respond to placebos for a variety of conditions. Despite the common conduct of these trials and the strong emphasis placed on informed consent, very little is kno...
It is estimated that approximately half of emergency department (ED) usage in the U.S. and other developed countries is for non-urgent conditions and that this usage is related to availability, social, and eco...
Executive walk rounds (EWRs) are a widely used but unstudied activity designed to improve safety culture in hospitals. Therefore, we measured the impact of EWRs on one important part of safety culture – provid...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Health Services Research 2005 5:46
In recent years, Dutch general practitioner (GP) out-of-hours service has been reorganised into large-scale GP cooperatives. Until now little is known about GPs' experiences with working at these cooperatives ...
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disease which at present has no cure, and it usually results in severe disability. The burden of PD increases as the illness progresses, resulting in the...
Systems that are used by different organisations to grade the quality of evidence and the strength of recommendations vary. They have different strengths and weaknesses. The GRADE Working Group has developed a...
While the Iranian nursing profession tries to reach to its full capacity for participating in the maintenance of public health, its desire to develop is strongly influenced by cultural, economic, and religious...
Proposals to expand Medicare coverage tend to be expensive, but the value of services purchased is not known. This study evaluates the efficiency of the average private supplemental insurance plan for Medicare...
In British Columbia, Canada, all necessary medical services are funded publicly. Concerned with growing wait lists in the mid-1990s, the provincial government started providing extra funding for coronary arter...
Inexpensive antihypertensive drugs are at least as effective and safe as more expensive drugs. Overuse of newer, more expensive antihypertensive drugs is a poor use of resources. The potential savings are subs...
Outreach facilitation has been proven successful in improving the adoption of clinical preventive care guidelines in primary care practice. The net costs and savings of delivering such an intensive interventio...
Treatment delay in first episode psychosis is common. As general practitioners are the first point of contact for many individuals with first episode psychosis, they are well placed to detect the early symptom...
The AGREE instrument has been validated for evaluating Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG) pertaining to medical care. This study evaluated the reliability and validity of physical therapists using the AGREE to...
Studies conducted in developed countries using economic models show that individual- and household- level variables are important determinants of health insurance ownership. There is however a dearth of such s...
Quality of care from the perspective of users is increasingly used in evaluating health care performance. Going beyond satisfaction studies, quality of care from the users' perspective is conceptualised in two...
Administrative health care databases may be particularly useful for injury surveillance, given that they are population-based, readily available, and relatively complete. Surveillance based on administrative d...
Due to the complexity of health system reform in the post-conflict, post-disaster, and development settings, attempts to restructure health services are fraught with pitfalls that are often unanticipated becau...
Seasonality is a common feature of communicable diseases. Less well understood is whether seasonal patterns occur for non-communicable diseases. The overall effect of seasonal fluctuations on hospital admissio...
The aim of this body of research is to determine whether injuries in the home are more common in particular types of housing. Previous home injuries research has tended to focus on behaviours or the provision ...
The increasing prevalence and impact of obstructive lung diseases and new insights, reflected in clinical guidelines, have led to concerns about the diagnosis and therapy of asthma and COPD in primary care. In...
In quality of care research, limited information is found on the relationship between quality of care and disease outcomes. This case-control study was conducted with the aim to assess the effect of guideline ...
Swedish patient associations for breast cancer patients (PABCPs) offer patients with breast cancer unlimited meetings with a breast cancer survivor, a contact person (CP). We applied the voluntary action persp...
Priority setting, also known as rationing or resource allocation, occurs at all levels of every health care system. Daniels and Sabin have proposed a framework for priority setting in health care institutions ...
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...
