OBJECTIVE Improving diabetes care in the U.S. is critical because diabetes rates are increasing dramatically, particularly among minority and low-income populations. Although evidence-based practice guidelines for diabetes have been widely disseminated, many physicians fail to implement them. The objective of this study was to explore what happens to diabetes practice guidelines in real-world c...

While World Health Organization member countries embraced the concept of universal coverage as early as 2005, few low-income countries have yet achieved the objective. This is mainly due to numerous barriers that hamper access to needed health services. In this paper we provide an overview of the various dimensions of barriers to access to health care in low-income countries (geographical acces...

Even though washing hands with soap is among the most effective measures to reduce the risk of infection, handwashing rates in infrastructure-restricted settings remain seriously low. Little is known about how context alone and in interaction with psychosocial factors influence hand hygiene behavior. The aim of this article was to explore how both contextual and psychosocial factors affect hand...

BACKGROUND Initiatives to promote early diagnosis include raising public awareness of signs and symptoms of cancer and addressing barriers to seeking medical help about cancer. Awareness of signs and symptoms of cancer and emotional barriers, such as fear, worry, and embarrassment, strongly influence help seeking behaviour. Whether anxiety influences seeking medical help about cancer is not kno...

OBJECTIVE To determine the level of moderate-vigorous-intensity physical activity (MVPA) assessed via self-report and accelerometer in the college population, and to examine intrapersonal and contextual variables associated with physical activity (PA). PARTICIPANTS Participants were 77 college students at a university in the northwest sampled between January 2011 and December 2011. METHODS ...

Women live within complex and differing social, economic, and environmental circumstances that influence options to seek health care. In this article we report on a metasynthesis of qualitative research concerning access disparities for women in the Canadian province of Ontario, where there is a publicly funded health care system. We took a metastudy approach to analysis of results from 35 rele...

We introduce a method for content-based advertisement selection for personal blog pages, based on combining multiple representations of the blog. The core idea behind the method is that personal blogs represent individuals, whose interests can be modeled by the language used in the blog itself combined with the language used in related sources of information, such as comments posted to a blog p...