BACKGROUND Specialty distribution in Kenya continues to exhibit gender disparities despite the increasing number of female medical students graduating each year. This study aimed at assessing specialty preferences and factors influencing these choices among male and female medical students in Kenya. METHODS Four hundred and fifty medical students, from first to fifth year of study at the Univ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the frequency of barriers to specialty care and to assess which barriers are associated with an incomplete specialty referral (not attending a specialty visit when referred by a primary care provider) among children seen in community health centers. STUDY DESIGN Two months after their child's specialty referral, 341 parents completed telephone surveys assessing whether a s...

STUDY OBJECTIVE The American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) Longitudinal Study of Emergency Physicians (LSEP) was initiated to describe the development of a new medical specialty through the continuing study of the lives of representative emergency physicians. The study is designed to gather data periodically over many years to come. The primary purpose of this article is to provide a basel...

A large number of probationers with mental illness (PMIs) are under supervision in the United States. In this national survey, we compared the supervision approaches of a matched sample of 66 specialty mental health and 25 traditional probation agencies. The prototypic specialty agency has five key features that distinguish it from the traditional model: (a) exclusive mental health caseloads, (...

Specialty hospitals, owned and operated by physicians with an expertise in a particular medical condition, offer the opportunity to design a utopian care environment for optimal delivery of care. In fact, the concept of specialty heart hospitals dates back to the mid-19th century in England, with the opening in 1857 of London’s National Hospital for Diseases of the Heart and Paralysis. The inst...

With increased innovation and development of specialty pharmaceuticals, the US and global healthcare industries are looking to implement appropriate management strategies to control both utilization and costs. Specialty pharmaceuticals are high-cost medications that treat complex, chronic, rare, and difficult-to-manage conditions. These drugs require special drug handling, appropriate clinical ...

INTRODUCTION Medical students are the source of a country's physicians. Determining how medical students select their areas of specialization is the key to achieve a balanced distribution of doctors among all specialties. The objective is to identify the number of medical students who have decided their postgraduate specialty career, their career specialties preference, and factors that may inf...

Specialty hospitals, particularly those specializing in surgery and owned by physicians, have generated a relatively high degree of policy attention over the past several years. The main focus of policy debates has been in two areas: the extent to which specialty hospitals might compete unfairly with incumbent general hospitals and the extent to which physician ownership might be associated wit...

The royal decree RD 639/2014 has been published, regulating among others, the core curriculum, and specific areas of training (SAT). It is of great interest for the specialty of General and Digestive Surgery (GS and DS). The aim is to expose and clarify the main provisions and reflect on their implications for the practical application of the core curriculum and SAT in the specialty of General ...