BACKGROUND One of the debates regarding the role of chiropractors is whether or not they should be considered as primary healthcare practitioners. Primary care is often used to describe chiropractic but without any definition of what is meant by the term. Primary healthcare itself has many definitions and this adds to the problem. Existing research literature, based mostly in the USA, suggests ...

Practice-based research supported by practice-based research network (PBRN) infrastructure has historically provided an important method for challenging guidelines and evidence arising from secondary and tertiary care settings. This sample of current practice-based research in this issue of the JABFM provides an opportunity to ask whether practice-based research continues to address questions r...

OBJECTIVE To analyze whether the level of institutional and matrix support is associated with better certification of primary healthcare teams. METHODS In this cross-sectional study, we evaluated two kinds of primary healthcare support - 14,489 teams received institutional support and 14,306 teams received matrix support. Logistic regression models were applied. In the institutional support m...

Queuing leading to significant waiting times is common for patients in a healthcare delivery system. Although, there are many alternatives to choose amongst many options to reduce queuing including prioritization, increase in capacity, rationing, public private partnerships, patient and physician education etc. the present study was conducted in Institute of Nuclear Medicine and Allied Sciences...

Up until the late twentieth century, there was a trend in healthcare provision for care away from the home and into a range of increasingly complex facilities including local health centers – at the community level including doctors offices and community hospitals (primary care), to local hospitals providing a limited range of services, e.g. emergency care (secondary care), through to specialis...

BACKGROUND Over the past decade, in the province of Quebec, Canada, the government has initiated two consecutive reforms. These have created a new type of primary healthcare - family medicine groups (FMGs) - and have established 95 geographically defined local health networks (LHNs) across the province. A key goal of these reforms was to improve collaboration among healthcare organizations. The...

Health is now widely acknowledged as having both a physical and mental health dimension. Indeed, as far back as 1948, WHO’s constitution recognised health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. Despite this, many primary healthcare systems in countries around the world focus on physical care, failing to provide mental...

PURPOSE To describe the coding and documentation practices of nurse practitioners (NPs) when using evaluation and management (E & M) codes in an academic primary care center. DATA SOURCES A randomized retrospective review of ten charts from a nurse-managed primary care clinic affiliated with a midwestern research-intensive university. CONCLUSION The findings demonstrate that the documentati...

BACKGROUND Knowledge about safety culture improves patient safety (PS) in health-care organizations. The first contact a patient has with health care occurs at the primary level. We conducted a survey to measure patient safety culture (PSC) among primary care professionals (PCPs) of health centres (HCs) in Spain and analyzed PS dimensions that influence PSC. METHODS We used Agency for Healthc...

Introduction Over the past decade, overcrowding in emergency departments (ED) has become a serious problem in many developed countries.1,2 A recent international literature review reported that between 4.8% to 90% of ED patients were potentially non-urgent cases.3,4,5 This high number of nonurgent paediatric ED (PED) visits is a huge fi nancial burden to families as well as to society, not just...