BACKGROUND NHS Direct, introduced in 1998, has provided 24/7 telephone-based healthcare advice and information to the public in England and Wales. National studies have suggested variation in the uptake of this service amongst the UK's diverse population. This study provides the first exploration of the barriers and facilitators that impact upon the uptake of this service from the perspectives ...

The protective features that families and wider social relationships can have are required to meet the demands of life in contemporary Western societies. Choice and detraditionalization, however; impede this source of solidarity. Family Group Conferencing (FGC) and other life-world led interventions have the potential to strengthen primary groups. This paper explores the need for such a social ...

BACKGROUND Primary care professionals are presumed to play a central role in delivering long-term condition management. However the value of their contribution relative to other sources of support in the life worlds of patients has been less acknowledged. Here we explore the value of primary care professionals in people's personal communities of support for long-term condition management. MET...

BACKGROUND Existing literature on the design of interventions and health policy about self-management have tended to focus on individual-centred definitions of self-care and there is growing recognition of the need to extend consideration beyond individual factors, which determine self-care, to examine wider influences such as the health service, the family and the wider social context. AIMS ...

This article assesses whether there are methodological problems with child outcome measures that may contribute to the small associations between child care quality and child outcomes found in the literature. Outcome measures used in 65 studies of child care quality published between 1979 and December 2005 were examined, taking the previous review by Vandell and Wolfe (2000) as the starting poi...

Carl van Walraven and colleagues recently presented a timely article about the information gaps that impede continuity of care for Canadian patients. Both the article and the accompanying commentary discussed the potential of electronic health records for facilitating provider-to-provider information sharing. This possibility is becoming a reality as the Canada Health Infoway works to establish...

Two types of model propose that strategic decisions during contests are determined either by (i) a mutual-assessment process or (ii) a self-assessment process. Vocal signals are thought to convey information about the competitive abilities of individuals, the ultimate function of which is a reduction in costs associated with fighting consistent with the principle of mutual assessment. Neverthel...

Many constructs of interest to occupational therapists can only be studied through qualitative methods. Such constructs include meaning of activity or the illness experience and the context in which these occur. The purpose of this paper is to describe how ethnographic methods used in research can be generalized and applied to clinical practice. Ethnography is compared with other qualitative re...

Software process improvement aims at improving the development process of software systems. It is initiated by process assessment identifying strengths and weaknesses and based on the findings, improvement plans are developed. In general, a process reference model (e.g., CMMI) is used throughout the process of software process improvement as the base. CMMI defines a set of process areas involve...

This article documents the successful creation and promotion of a bill to fund a nurse home visitation program for high-risk mothers in Arkansas. It illustrates several key factors in successful advocacy by pediatricians working in an academic setting: a realistic time commitment; a community needs assessment, data assimilation, and review of existing resources; the identification and incorpora...