OBJECTIVE To identify factors associated with general satisfaction among clients attending outpatient clinics in a referral hospital in Uganda. DESIGN Cross-sectional exit survey of patients and care-givers in selected outpatient clinics. SETTING Seven outpatients' clinics at Mulago National Referral and Teaching Hospital. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Mean score of clients' general satisfaction ...

UNLABELLED QUESTION UNDER STUDY/PRINCIPLES: Ambulatory care is a mandatory component of post-graduate training in general internal medicine. Academic outpatient clinics face challenges in training residents in terms of exposure to sufficient patient case-mix, diversity of clinical activities and continuity of care while fulfilling their mission to provide care to vulnerable populations. We repo...

OBJECTIVES Despite great needs, many children in foster care do not receive adequate medical care. Suboptimal care may be attributable in part to placement changes, which disrupt continuity of care by both a consistent surrogate parent and potentially a primary care physician. These disruptions in turn may lead to increased use of the emergency department (ED) for outpatient care. The primary a...

BACKGROUND Adults with chronic disease are the most frequent users of the primary healthcare system. In Manitoba, patients are allowed to seek ambulatory (outpatient) care from the provider of their choosing (primary care physician or specialist), with referrals to specialists preferred but not always required. Some patients receive their routine care from specialists. We conducted this study t...

Efforts to assess the quality of ambulatory care services provided to Medicare beneficiaries cannot meaningfully proceed unless a concerted effort is made to develop criteria and standards for ambulatory care quality assessment that reflect the specific characteristics and needs of the elderly. In this article, we describe some of those characteristics and needs--such as physical and mental imp...

Ambulatory care sensitive conditions (ACSC), for example severe cases of asthma, pneumonia and heart failure, force to hospitalizations when not preventing. Those necessary hospitalizations signal health problems which need better ambulatory care, and that can be avoided when care is appropriate. We analyze hospitalizations by ACSC from the general practitioner/family physician' point of view, ...

CONTEXT Homeless persons face numerous barriers to receiving health care and have high rates of illness and disability. Factors associated with health care utilization by homeless persons have not been explored from a national perspective. OBJECTIVE To describe factors associated with use of and perceived barriers to receipt of health care among homeless persons. DESIGN AND SETTING Secondar...

BACKGROUND Rapid emergence of influenza A viruses resistance to anti-influenza drugs has been observed in the past five years. Our objective was to compare antiviral prescription patterns of ambulatory care providers to patients with a diagnosis of influenza before and after the 2005-2006 influenza season, which was temporally concordant with the emergence of adamantane resistance. We also dete...

OBJECTIVES Based on a recent patient survey from Taiwan, where there is universal health insurance coverage and unrestricted physician choice, this study examined the relationship between physician specialty and the quality of primary medical care experiences. METHODS We assessed ambulatory patients' experiences with medical care using the Primary Care Assessment Tool, representing 7 primary ...

Ambulatory Care Sensitive Conditions (ACSC) are conditions where the provision of ambulatory care may affect the probability of hospitalization or the severity of the disease at the time of hospitalization. Population-based measurement of ACSCs can focus attention on aspects of ambulatory care that merit strengthening to improve access, quality, or patient compliance to achieve better outcomes ...