This perspective paper makes a brief conceptual review of continuity and argues that relationship continuity is the most controversial type. Plentiful evidence of association with better satisfaction and outcomes urgently needs to be supplemented by studies of causation. The scope of these has been outlined in this paper. Evidence strongly suggests that patients generally want more relationship...

A: Abandonment of a patient may result in civil liability for the physician. Abandonment is usually defined as "the unilateral severance of the professional relationship without reasonable notice at a time when there is still the necessity of continuing medical attention." 1 Proof of actionable abandonment requires a showing that the physician failed to provide "an adequate medical attendant" a...

We study a key part of NHS policy to ensure high quality health care: failure to supply such care cost the NHS £787m in clinical negligence payouts during 2009-10. The NHS uses risk management standards to incentivise care and we examine their effects on MRSA infections. Using a specially assembled dataset, our GMM results suggest that improvements in the risk management standards attained by s...

It is important to understand how legal fact finders determine causation and assign blame. However, this process is poorly understood. Among the psychological factors that affect decision makers are an omission bias (a tendency to blame actions more than inactions [omissions] for bad results), and a normality bias (a tendency to react more strongly to bad outcomes that spring from abnormal rath...

Single-cell RNA and protein concentrations dynamically fluctuate because of stochastic ("noisy") regulation. Consequently, biological signaling and genetic networks not only translate stimuli with functional response but also random fluctuations. Intuitively, this feature manifests as the accumulation of fluctuations from the network source to the target. Taking advantage of the fact that noise...

BACKGROUND Different theories of the link between socio-economic status (SES) and mental illness have been postulated. In particular, two theories of this association, social causation and social selection, differ in the implied causal pathway. The authors employ behavior genetic modeling to consider evidence for both social selection and social causation in the relationship between income vari...

Purpose of review We review current thinking on the aetiology of multiple sclerosis, how genetic susceptibility interacts with environmental risk factors at the population level, multiple sclerosis-associated risk factors and contemporary causation theory. Recent findings Two large genomic studies have confirmed the unambiguous associations with the DRB1 and DQB alleles of the human leucocyte a...