INTRODUCTION While patient and citizen engagement has been recognised as a crucial element in healthcare reform, limited attention has been paid to how best to engage seniors-the fastest growing segment of the population and the largest users of the healthcare system. To improve the healthcare services for this population, seniors and their families need to be engaged as active partners in heal...

the article by potts et al, “the pill is mightier than the sword,” points out that family planning has an important role to play in building peace by increasing women’s empowerment and their agency, ultimately helping peacebuilding efforts. evidence has demonstrated that family planning programs are cost effective, produce quick results, help women and couples meet their desired fertility level...

The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) recently has received much attention in health systems literature. The PCMH holds considerable promise for improving health outcomes and re-establishing a role for family medicine in a fragmented health care system. Despite its philosophical approach to comprehensive health care reform, the PCMH fails to offer concrete recommendations to address the soci...

BACKGROUND Advance care planning (ACP) is a process of reflection on and communication of a person's future health-care preferences. Evidence suggests visible minorities engage less in ACP. The South Asian ethnic group is the largest visible minority group in Canada, and information is needed to understand how ACP is perceived and how best to approach ACP within this diverse community. OBJECT...

BACKGROUND Clinical guidelines provide systematically developed recommendations for deciding on appropriate health care options for specific conditions and clinical circumstances. Up until recently, patients and caregivers have rarely been included in the process of developing care guidelines. OBJECTIVE This project will develop and test a new online method for including patients and their ca...

BACKGROUND Rising rates of smartphone ownership highlight opportunities for improved mobile application usage in clinical trials. While current methods call for device provisioning, the "bring your own device" (BYOD) model permits participants to use personal phones allowing for improved patient engagement and lowered operational costs. However, more evidence is needed to demonstrate the BYOD m...

OBJECTIVES Patient engagement (PE) improves patient, organisation and health system outcomes, but most research is based on primary care. The primary purpose of this study was to describe the characteristics of published empirical research that evaluated PE in hospital health service improvement. DESIGN Scoping review. METHODS Five databases were searched from 2006 to September 2016. Englis...

BACKGROUND As in other countries, the traditional doctor-patient relationship in the Japanese healthcare system has often been characterised as being of a paternalistic nature. However, in recent years there has been a gradual shift towards a more participatory-patient model in Japan. With advances in technology, the possibility to use digital technologies to improve patient interactions is gro...