Untreated opiate use is correlated with major social harms and costs in Canada. While methadone treatment has existed in Canada since the 1960s, there is little specific Canadian research on its effects. This paper reports on the one-year follow-up results of a Toronto cohort study of opiate users (N = 114) who were not in treatment at baseline. Sixty-nine people were recruited for re-interview...

BACKGROUND Canadians receive over 422 million prescriptions and spend over $26 billion annually on drugs. Yet, we do not systematically capture information on whether the right drugs reach the right people with the intended benefits, while avoiding unintended harm. It is important to identify and understand the effectiveness of approaches used to improve prescribing and medication use. OBJECT...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the potential utility of asking parents about health care utilization as a means of identifying individuals at risk for psychosocial problems. METHOD Parents of 366 children ages 2 to 16 completed questionnaires about their own, their child's, and their family's psychosocial functioning and health care utilization. RESULTS Children and parents with high health care ...

Background While a large literature links psychosocial workplace factors with health and health behaviors, there is very little work connecting psychosocial workplace factors to healthcare utilization.   Methods Survey data were collected from two different employers using computer-assisted telephone interviewing as a part of the Work-Family Health Network (2008-2013): one in the information te...

Utilization of health care facilities is an important elements factored into any policy or programme aimed at improving the health status citizens of every country. The paper examines factors which determine health care utilization of residents of Lake Bosomtwe basin of Ghana. The study employed the human ecology of disease triangle model to assess how residents utilize health care facilities. ...

Hospital utilization reviews are performed on the basis of lists of explicit criteria, such as the Appropriateness Evaluation Protocol, both concurrently and retrospectively, in an increasing number of settings as part of efforts to improve the performance of hospitals and to reduce health care costs. Retrospective data collection has advantages in terms of expenses and ease of sampling, but re...

OBJECTIVE To examine the merits of the Asthma Therapy Assessment Questionnaire (ATAQ) control index together with prior asthma health-care utilization from administrative data in predicting future acute asthma health-care utilization. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. POPULATION A total of 4,788 adult asthma patients aged 17 to 93 years who completed a baseline evaluation and had at least 6 ...