In a recent leading article on Griffiths in action the British Medical J7ournal suggested that the tabloid headline might have been "Administrators hijack NHS."' Hence the title for this article, which captures the essence of my experience of a course held at the King's Fund College. This was the introductory week of a two year training programme for registrars in community medicine; most of th...

Dr. Kuthy is Professor and Head of Preventive and Community Dentistry, University of Iowa College of Dentistry; Dr. Woolfolk is Professor, Department of Periodontics and Oral Medicine, and Assistant Dean for Student Services, University of Michigan School of Dentistry; Dr. Bailit is Professor Emeritus, Department of Community Medicine and Health Care, University of Connecticut School of Medicin...

Department of Family and Community Medicine, St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Department of Family and Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Centre for Research on Inner City Health, Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Division of Clinical Public Health, Dalla Lana School of Public H...

BACKGROUND The use of teams is a well-known approach in a variety of settings, including health care, in both developed and developing countries. Team performance is comprised of teamwork and task work, and ascertaining whether a team is performing as expected to achieve the desired outcome has rarely been done in health care settings in resource-limited countries. Measuring teamwork requires i...

From *the Department of Family Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont.; †the Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont.; ‡the Health Promotion and Environmental Health Protection Office, Toronto Public Health, Toronto, Ont.; and §the Community Medicine Residency Program, Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Hami...

For several years, all five medical faculties of Switzerland have embarked on a reform of their training curricula for two reasons: first, according to a new federal act issued in 2006 by the administration of the confederation, faculties needed to meet international standards in terms of content and pedagogic approaches; second, all Swiss universities and thus all medical faculties had to adap...

MRI is increasingly used to study normal and abnormal brain development, but we lack a clear understanding of "normal". Previous studies have been limited by small samples, narrow age ranges and few behavioral measures. This multi-center project conducted epidemiologically based recruitment of a large, demographically balanced sample across a wide age range, using strict exclusion factors and c...

Pneumonia generates a high workload for internal medicine departments. Management of this disease is challenging, because patients are usually elderly and have multiple comorbid conditions. Furthermore, the interpretation and adherence to guidelines are far from clear in this setting. We report the opinion of 43 internists especially interested in infectious diseases that were questioned at the...

The term 'social vaccine' is designed to encourage the biomedically orientated health sector to recognize the legitimacy of action on the distal social and economic determinants of health. It is proposed as a term to assist the health promotion movement in arguing for a social view of health which is so often counter to medical and popular conceptions of health. The idea of a social vaccine bui...

BACKGROUND One of the main factors relating to quality of hospitals is effective discharge planning. Discharge planning promotes the quality of inpatient care and reduces unplanned hospital readmission. The current study investigated the challenges of discharge planning observed in the health system of Iran. METHODS This qualitative research was conducted using a thematic and framework analys...