OBJECTIVES To increase, in our sample, the proportion of family physicians who provided their patients with written physical activity prescriptions after the delivery of a 3-hour educational workshop with the provision of practical tools to facilitate behaviour change. DESIGN A pre-post study. SETTING Abbotsford and Mission, British Columbia. PARTICIPANTS All 158 physicians registered wit...

BACKGROUND Requiring written informed consent for a minimal-risk survey may result in limited participation rates. METHODS Data from a cross-sectional survey of 177 older patients (87 blacks and 90 whites) with hypertension enrolled in the managed care Medicare risk product were used to assess participation rates pre- and postwaiver of written informed consent and Health Insurance Portability...

OBJECTIVE To undertake a national survey to determine current practice for the management of whiplash injuries in UK emergency departments (ED). METHODS Postal questionnaire survey. 316 lead consultants from all UK ED with annual new attendances of over 50 000 people were asked to indicate the use of a range of treatments and the frequency with which these treatments were used. Samples of wri...

Using Web information in example-based dialogue systems is considered to be a good way to increase the topical relevance of system responses. However, Web content is mostly written documents, not colloquial utterances. To alleviate the discrepancy in style between written and spoken language, we suggest that the corpus should be selected subsets of the Web, viz., online bulletin boards. The nat...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to cross-culturally adapt the Armando Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire into Arabic and validate its use in the general population. METHODS The translation was conducted based on the principles of the most widely used model in questionnaire translation, namely Brisling's back-translation model. A written authorization allowing translation into Arabic was o...

PURPOSE To date, no measures of fecal incontinence severity or its impact on quality of life have been validated for telephone interview. This study was designed to 1) compare responses of a self-administered and a telephone-administered Fecal Incontinence Severity Index; 2) compare a self-administered Fecal Incontinence Quality of Life Scale to the Manchester Health Questionnaire after modifyi...

OBJECTIVES To reveal the effect of age and other factors on perceived anxiety over radiation exposure among decontamination workers in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. METHODS A survey questionnaire was sent to 1505 workers, with questions regarding age, presence of a written employment contract, previous residence, radiation passbook ownership, presence of close persons for consultation, knowled...