BACKGROUND Among many Kenyan rural communities, access to in-patient healthcare services is seriously constrained. It is important to understand who has ready access to the facilities and services offered and what factors prevent those who do not from doing so. AIM To identify factors affecting time of access of in-patient healthcare services at a rural district hospital in Kenya. SETTING W...

BACKGROUND A substantial proportion of schizophrenia patients deny aspects of their illness to others, which may indicate a deeper disturbance of 'insight' and a self-reflection deficit. The present study used a 'levels-of-processing' mnemonic paradigm to examine whether such patients engage in particularly brief and shallow self-reflection during mental illness-related self-evaluation. METHO...

Dropout is a common problem in the treatment of psychiatric illnesses including bipolar disorders (BD). The aim of the present study is to investigate illness perceptions of dropout patients with BD. A cross sectional study was done on the participants who attended the Mood Disorder Outpatient Clinic at least 3 times from January 2003 through June 2008, and then failed to attend clinic till to ...

Health interventions aimed at secondary prevention of myocardial infarction (MI) are important. Patients' illness perceptions influence adherence behaviors and actions. Providing adequate infomation about the disease and lifestyle interventions is an important task for health care professionals. Therefore, a question of interest is how health care professionals perceive myocardial infarction th...

The study examined the illness perception dissimilarities between chronic cardiac patients and their spouses, as well as the associations of perception dissimilarities with patients' overall self-rated health (SRH) and illness-related coping strategies. Seventy-three patients (65 males, 8 females) with an old myocardial infarction and subsequent cardiovascular problems, and their spouses comple...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study is to investigate the attitudes towards mental illness and psychiatry among fifth year Spanish medical students. METHODS The study included 171 students from three medical schools located in different areas of Spain: Cádiz; UCA (n = 113), Madrid; San Pablo-CEU (n = 22), and Barcelona; UAB (n = 36). They responded, prior to their undergraduate medical course in ...

INTRODUCTION The factors influencing adherence of patients diagnosed with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) include the complexity of the therapy, fear of side effects of drugs, method of taking the drug, dosage regimen, polypharmacy, adverse events, knowledge about the essence of the disease and its complications, illness perception and priorities in life, training on the...

AIM. To investigate illness perception in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and its association with the degree of control over relevant cardiovascular risk factors. METHODS. A cross-sectional questionnaire-based study was performed from June 2007 to March 2008. A stratified random sample of 46 Croatian general practitioners was asked to select, using systematic sampling, the first 6 patie...

BACKGROUND Patients with medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) are often distressed, disabled and dissatisfied with the care they receive. Illness beliefs held by patients have a major influence on the decision to consult, persistence of symptoms and the degree of disability. Illness perception models consist of frameworks to organise information from multiple sources into distinct but interrela...

BACKGROUND Quality of life is an umbrella concept that refers to all aspects of a person's life, including health status and well-being. While health status measure focuses on the impact of the disease on physical functioning, well-being represents the self-representation of the emotional states related to the disease itself. OBJECTIVES The objective of this study was to evaluate the psycholo...