During the past 35 years, the roles for nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) have evolved in parallel with the roles that physicians have come to play. Shifting needs in primary care and expanding opportunities in specialty medicine have been the dominant trends. Future directions will be influenced additionally by the deepening physician shortage. NPs are preparing for this...

Attempts to reduce the problem of tuberculosis through organised efforts had their beginnings in India in the late thirties. With the introduction of chemotherapy, organised home treatment of tuberculosis from the TB clinics, situated mainly in cities and district headquarter towns, was started. The mass BCG campaign, started in 1951, gave the first indications that the problem of tuberculosis ...

Context The Chinese government launched a comprehensive healthcare reform to tackle challenges to health equities. Medical education will become the key for successful healthcare reform. Purpose We describe the current status of the Chinese medical degree system and its evolution over the last 80 years. Content Progress has been uneven, historically punctuated most dramatically by the Cultural ...

We sought to identify and understand the health care needs of young people living with HIV/AIDS, particularly in terms of their psychosocial well-being. We conducted a qualitative analysis of HIV-positive young people and their caregivers, focusing on the implications of an HIV diagnosis for health care needs. Stigma was a recurrent issue that arose in the interviews conducted with the responde...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether the original continuity of care framework is still applicable to family medicine today. DESIGN Qualitative descriptive study. SETTING Kingston, Ont. PARTICIPANTS Three groups of first-year family medicine residents (18 in total), 2 groups of family physicians in established comprehensive practices (9 in total), and 2 groups of family physicians working in ep...

oral health problems, among the most prevalent comorbidities related to addiction, require more attention by both clinicians and policy-makers. our aims were to review oral complications associated with drugs, oral health care in addiction rehabilitation, health services available, and barriers against oral health promotion among addicts. drug abuse is associated with serious oral health proble...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Fifteen percent of Medicare patients receive care only from specialists. This has led to the supposition that there might be a "hidden system of primary care," where specialists provide comprehensive care to their patients, including care traditionally outside their specialty domain. This study explores the perspectives of specialists at an academic medical center on t...

OBJECTIVE To provide a baseline measure of the proportion of US children who meet the Maternal and Child Health Bureau's core outcomes for children with special health care needs (CSHCN). Those core outcomes include the following: 1) families of CSHCN will partner in decision making and will be satisfied with the services that they receive; 2) CSHCN will receive coordinated, ongoing comprehensi...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this article is to report the findings of the National Survey of Children With Special Health Care Needs regarding parent perceptions of the extent to which children with special health care needs (CSHCN) have access to a medical home. METHODS Five criteria, selected to reflect the characteristics of a medical home as defined by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP...