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. ...

PURPOSE Recent work suggests that the biopsychosocial model should be expanded to include the spiritual dimension as well. The purpose of this study was to assess the independent effects of spiritual symptoms and their interactions with biopsychosocial symptoms on health care utilization, extreme use of services, and life satisfaction among primary care patients. METHODS Three hundred fifty-t...

A cross-sectional survey, in 1991, of 3100 families in 45 contiguous villages in the Pune district of Maharashtra state showed that 456 under-5-year-olds had suffered an acute respiratory infection and/or diarrhoea during the previous 7 days. Significantly more boys (88.9%) than girls (76.5%) were treated by a registered private medical practitioner (odds ratio (OR) = 2.51). Referrals for furth...

PURPOSE Care coordination is increasingly recognized as a necessary element of high-quality, patient-centered care. This study investigated (1) the association between care coordination and continuity of primary care, and (2) differences in this association by level of specialty care use. METHODS We conducted a cross-sectional study of Medicare enrollees with select chronic conditions in an i...

patients and methods a questionnaire was developed by a departmental checklist focus group, which aimed to identify the perception of health care checklists in general as well as specific checklists for routine and crisis situations in anesthesia. furthermore participants were asked regarding their perception of performing routine anesthesia and managing crisis situations without any cognitive ...

OBJECTIVE The effects of family and place on health outcomes may be seriously misestimated by standard analytic techniques. The information-rich settings in several Canadian provinces can provide appropriate designs to minimize biases resulting from omitted variables and measurement error. This paper compares siblings with children living in the same neighbourhood (but not in the same family) i...

BACKGROUND The entire population of Mongolia has free access to primary health care, which is fully funded by the government. It is provided by family health centers in urban settings. In rural areas, it is included in outpatient and inpatient services offered by rural soum (district) health centers. However, primary health care utilization differs across population groups. The aim of this stud...

Poison control centers hold great potential for saving health care resources particularly by preventing unnecessary medical utilization. We developed a four-question survey with three poisoning-related scenarios, based on common calls to our poison center, and one question regarding after-hours calls. We identified primary care provider offices in our poison center's region from an internet sea...

This paper, delivered as the 2000 Joseph W. Cullen Memorial Award Lecture, reviews smoking cessation treatment research conducted over the past 15 years at the Center for Health Studies, Group Health COOPERATIVE: The research program includes assessment, treatment, and health services research that addressed four main questions: (a) What motivates people to quit smoking? (b) Are self-help inter...

BACKGROUND Regions with geographically diverse ecology and socioeconomic circumstances may have different disease exposures and child health outcomes. This study assessed variations in the risks of death in children under age 5 across regions of Nigeria and determined characteristics at the individual and community levels that explain possible variations among regions. METHODS Multilevel Cox ...