Internationally, there is extensive empirical evidence that a strong primary care-led health system is associated with improved health outcomes, increased quality of care, decreased health inequalities and lower overall health-care costs. Within primary care, factors influencing access to, and utilisation of, general practitioner (GP) services have been widely examined and this paper focuses on...

We suggest that the optimal approach to building capacity in global mental health care will require partnerships between professional resources in high-income countries and promising health-related institutions in low- and middle-income countries. The result of these partnerships will be sustainable academic relationships that can educate a new generation of in-country primary care physicians a...

In 1920, the Dawson report advocated a population based approach to the organisation of health services, the allocation of resources, and the training of health care staff. It also introduced the concepts of primary and secondary levels of care and of primary care health centres. For several decades these ideas lay dormant, until medical specialisation, fragmentation of health services, and the...

BACKGROUND The Quality and Costs of Primary Care in Europe (QUALICOPC) study aims to analyse and compare how primary health care systems in 35 countries perform in terms of quality, costs and equity. This article answers the question 'How can the organisation and delivery of primary health care and its outcomes be measured through surveys of general practitioners (GPs) and patients?' It will al...

In recent years, there has been an increased national focus on assessing and improving the quality of health care. This statement provides recommendations and criteria for assessment of the quality of primary care delivered to adolescents in the United States. Consistent implementation of American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations (periodicity of visits and confidentiality issues), renewed ...

BACKGROUND Non-response in health surveys may lead to bias in estimates of health care utilisation. The magnitude, direction and composition of the bias are usually not well known. When data from health surveys are merged with data from registers at the individual level, analyses can reveal non-response bias. Our aim was to estimate the composition, direction and magnitude of non-response bias ...

The Santa Coloma de Gramenet Primary Care Service has designed a new tool to standardize and automate the process of planning the number of needed health care workers. The tool is divided in two parts: a calculator, which gives guidance on the foreseeable risk depending on the activity and the health care workers' workload, and sentinel indicators; the main is the "welfare basic level", that is...