Canada's publicly funded healthcare system ensures that medically necessary hospital and physician services are available without financial barriers, but not all community-based care is covered. Consequently, many patients experience financial shocks (FS) related to community-based healthcare services not funded by government, and perhaps also from lost income, a situation that may be difficult...

BACKGROUND Data stored in personally controlled health records (PCHRs) may hold value for clinicians and public health entities, if patients and their families will share them. We sought to characterize consumer willingness and unwillingness (reticence) to share PCHR data across health topics, and with different stakeholders, to advance understanding of this issue. METHODS Cross-sectional 200...

Malaria remains a major public health challenge with almost half of the world's population exposed to the risk of contracting the illness. Prompt, effective and well tolerated treatment remains one of the cornerstones in the disease management, with artemisinin-based combination therapy the recommended option for non-severe malaria in endemic areas with predominant Plasmodium falciparum infecti...

AIMS The nursing-led inpatient unit is designed to substitute for a period of care in acute hospital wards and to improve patient outcome prior to discharge to the community. This paper aims to evaluate the cost, from the UK National Health Service perspective, of transfer to a nursing-led inpatient unit for intermediate care and to discuss the impact of these findings to the future development...

Referring patients to other physicians is one of the most fundamental and frequently performed tasks in clinical practice. In 2009, referrals to other physicians weremadeduringalmost 1 in 10ambulatoryvisits in the United States for a total of more than 100 million referrals.1 Despite the routine nature of referrals, there is significant variation in how and when physicians choose to ask for spe...

QUESTION Recently, I had a visit from a 5-year-old patient who had been given bismuth subsalicylate for a diarrheal illness by a local family physician during a trip to South America. Is this a practice we should encourage? ANSWER Research from developing countries has found the use of bismuth subsalicylate to be effective in shortening the duration of diarrheal illness. Despite these finding...

Clinical prediction models are increasingly used to complement clinical reasoning and decision-making in modern medicine, in general, and in the cardiovascular domain, in particular. To these ends, developed models first and foremost need to provide accurate and (internally and externally) validated estimates of probabilities of specific health conditions or outcomes in the targeted individuals...

increased services, increased attention to unmet needs, and greater cost-effectiveness. Studies in Guatemala and Mexico showed that client screening resulted in greater information given to clients as well as important improvements in the use of services (Vernon and Foreit 1999). In a study in Peru, the screening intervention increased the number of services provided per client visit by 13 perc...