PURPOSE In the United Kingdom all health care providers are encouraged to consult with user groups. The submissions of charities and patient advocacy groups to NICE and SIGN are considered reflective of the patient groups they purport to represent, yet little is known about how representative they are. This pilot study was designed to ascertain how many patients attending a hospital based epile...

Purpose of this paper By describing some of the often ignored aspects of repository advocacy, such as disciplinary differences and how these might affect the adoption of a particular institutional repository, this paper aims to offer practical guidance to repository managers and those responsible for open access and repository policy. Design/methodology/approach The argument uses examples from ...

BACKGROUND Diabetes mortality at the United States-Mexico border is twice the national average. Type 2 diabetes mellitus is increasingly diagnosed among children and adolescents. Fragmented services and scarce resources further restrict access to health care. Increased awareness of the incidence of disease and poor health outcomes became a catalyst for creating community-based coalitions and pa...

OBJECTIVE This article categorizes and describes current media campaigns to reduce college student drinking, reviews key principles of campaign design and outlines recommendations for future campaigns. METHOD The article describes three types of media campaigns on student drinking: information, social norms marketing, and advocacy. Key principles of campaign design are derived from work in co...

Developing countries in Africa and other regions share a similar profile of insufficient human resources for mental health, poor funding, a high unmet need for services and a low official prioritisation of mental health. This situation is worsened by misconceptions about the causes of mental disorders, stigma and discrimination that frequently result in harmful practices against persons with me...

Current research into patient advocacy focuses on attempts of patient groups to mobilise resources and to influence researchers, pharmaceutical companies and policy-makers. This paper adopts a 'framing political opportunities' approach to draw attention to other kinds of advocacy strategies. In a case study of breast cancer patient advocacy of Herceptin reimbursement, it is shown how patient gr...

It is perceived that, whilst development NGOs have secured worldwide small-scale successes, they have not achieved significant changes in the systems and structures that determine the distribution of power and resources within and between societies. As a result, their impact on the lives of poor people remains limited. Both for the sake of effectively helping as many people as possible and for ...

Facilitating community action is a key goal of health promotion. This paper describes a public health advocacy framework. It then presents a case study of its application for planning community action by a community alliance concerned about increased heavy traffic on roads through a small regional city in the South West region of Western Australia. The case study illustrates defining the public...

BACKGROUND The Pacific TROPIC (Translational Research for Obesity Prevention in Communities) project aimed to design, implement and evaluate a knowledge-broking approach to evidence-informed policy making to address obesity in Fiji. This paper reports on the quantitative evaluation of the knowledge-broking intervention through assessment of participants' perceptions of evidence use and developm...