Although most health care services can and should be provided by their medical home, children will be referred or require visits to the emergency department (ED) for emergent clinical conditions or injuries. Continuation of medical care after discharge from an ED is dependent on parents or caregivers' understanding of and compliance with follow-up instructions and on adherence to medication rec...

Accessibility is an important characteristic of primary health care contributing in large part to its success in making health care more efficient and equitable. Countries which have comprehensive primary health care systems have lower costs and generally healthier populations [1, 2]. To get the benefits of PHC services, people need to be able to access and use them. Access to primary health ca...

One of the central goals of comprehensive health care reform is to eliminate discrimination by health status in the sales and pricing of health insurance and reduce the financial burdens associated with poor health. Consequently, current proposals being considered by Congress would prohibit health insurers from setting premiums based explicitly on the health experience of enrollees. These propo...

BACKGROUND Supervised injectable heroin (SIH) treatment has emerged over the past 15 years as an intensive treatment for entrenched heroin users who have not responded to standard treatments such as oral methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) or residential rehabilitation. AIMS To synthesise published findings for treatment with SIH for refractory heroin-dependence through systematic review an...

INTRODUCTION Women veterans are a fast-growing segment of the veteran population, yet they face many barriers to medical care. The objective of this study was to examine factors that put women veterans at risk for a financial barrier to medical care. METHODS We conducted repeated cross-sectional analyses of data from the 2003, 2004, 2009, and 2010 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. W...

INTRODUCTION Bypassing refers to a person's decision to seek care at a healthcare facility that is not the nearest one of its type to the person's home. METHODS This study examined inpatient care facility bypassing in urban Bo, Sierra Leone using data from 1,980 women with children 15 years of age and younger who were interviewed in 2010-2011. The locations of residential structures and hospi...

BACKGROUND Women Veterans are a significant minority of users of the VA healthcare system, limiting provider and staff experience meeting their needs in environments historically designed for men. The VA is nonetheless committed to ensuring that women Veterans have access to comprehensive care in environments sensitive to their needs. OBJECTIVES We sought to determine what aspects of care nee...

BACKGROUND Despite Hong Kong government's official commitment to the development of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) over the last ten years, there appears to have been limited progress in public sector initiated career development and postgraduate training (PGT) for public university trained TCM practitioners. Instead, the private TCM sector is expected to play a major role in nurturing the ...

BACKGROUND The primary care in China can be provided by general practitioners (GPs) and other physicians (non-GPs). However, China's general practice system has never been really established. Chinese patients tend to consider the quality of primary care provided by GPs much lower than that of non-GPs. Besides, many GPs presently prefer leaving their own positions and seeking better development ...

OBJECTIVE To examine the effectiveness of hospital-based comprehensive care programs in improving the quality of care for children with special health care needs. DATA SOURCES A systematic review was conducted using Ovid MEDLINE, CINAHL, EMBASE, PsycINFO, Sociological Abstracts SocioFile, and Web of Science. STUDY SELECTION Evaluations of comprehensive care programs for categorical (those w...