More than 85% of the world's population lives in 153 low-income and middle-income countries (LAMICs). Although country-level information on mental health systems has recently become available, it still has substantial gaps and inconsistencies. Most of these countries allocate very scarce financial resources and have grossly inadequate manpower and infrastructure for mental health. Many LAMICs a...

BACKGROUND The perceived health status indicator included in the OECD Health Statistics suffers from severe methodological limitations related to data collection. Furthermore, this indicator is also included in the OECD's Better Life Index, thus distorting the total health score of some OECD countries, among them Israel. The purpose of this paper is to explore the erroneous use of OECD health d...

BACKGROUND Two new sets of stratification indicators--family's material affluence and adolescent's personal social position- were compared with traditional indicators of familial social position based on parental occupation and education for their ability to detect health inequality among adolescents. METHODS Survey data were collected in the Adolescent Health and Lifestyle Survey in 2003 fro...

INTRODUCTION Rural residence may reduce access to specialized mental health services. The objective of this study was to examine the role of rural residence in relation to service utilization. Using Canadian data collected in 2002, service use was examined as a function of the presence of anxiety or mood disorders and rural/urban residence. Use of four different types of professional mental hea...

BACKGROUND Health care regulatory agencies perform audits or inspections to judge the quality and safety of health care. This judgment is based on the assessment of a large set of health care indicators as accepted by the profession. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the influence of these indicators and whether a smaller number would be sufficient for a quality assessment or audit pr...

background: postpartum depression (ppd) is a common problem after child's birth and may influence the quality of life (qol). investigation of postpartum qol and depression can be useful for better care for mothers and improvement of their well-being. objectives: the objective of this study was to assess the life quality in mothers with and without ppd. patients and methods: in a prospective stu...

BACKGROUND Over the past decades, the deficient provision of evidence-based interventions for the prevention and treatment of mental health problems has become a global challenge across health care systems. In view of the ongoing diffusion of new media and mobile technologies into everyday life, Web-delivered electronic mental health (e-mental health) treatment services have been suggested to e...

Findings from studies that examined the association between health-related quality of life (HRQOL) and smoking status among COPD patients have been mixed. Moreover, factors associated with current smoking in COPD patients and differences by sex have not been fully elucidated. Data from the 2011 and 2012 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System was used in this study. Four HRQOL indicators wer...

Healthcare quality managers and researchers often need to identify specific healthcare events from administrative data. In this study, we examined whether Veterans Health Administration (VHA) clinic stop and bed section codes are reliable indicators of substance use disorder (SUD) treatment as documented in clinical progress notes. For outpatient records with a progress note, SUD clinic stop co...