A ssessment of vision and prescription of low vision devices are part of a comprehensive low vision service. Other components of the service include training the person affected by low vision in use of vision and other senses, mobility, activities of daily living, and support for education, employment or leisure activities. Specialist vision rehabilitation agencies have services to provide acce...

Bates et al., representing the National Alliance for Primary Care Informatics, identify several barriers to the adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) systems in primary care. Three barriers are highlighted: excessive cost, the transience of vendors, and the lack of common data standards. This otherwise excellent review fails to draw attention to the phenomenon of open-source software (OSS...

PURPOSE Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of mortality and morbidity in the United States. Primary care teams can be best suited to improve quality of care and lower costs for patients with cardiovascular disease. This study evaluates the associations between primary care team communication, interaction, and coordination (ie, social networks); quality of care; and costs for patients w...

Primary health care in Australia has undergone 2 decades of change. Starting with a vision for a national health strategy with general practice at its core, Australia established local meso-level primary health care organizations--Divisions of General Practice--moving from focus on individual practitioners to a professional collective local voice. The article identifies how these meso-level org...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether a pharmacist-led medications review in primary care reduces the number of drugs and the number of drug-related problems. DESIGN Prospective randomized controlled trial. SETTING Liljeholmen Primary Care Centre, Stockholm, Sweden. SUBJECTS 209 patients aged ≥ 65 years with five or more different medications. Intervention. Patients answered a questionnaire rega...

introduction: primary care organizations are the entities through which clinical governance is developed at local level. to implement clinical governance in primary care, awareness about principles, prerequisites and barriers of this quality improvement paradigm is necessary. the aim of this study is to pool evidence about implementing clinical governance in primary care organizations. data sou...

Primary care in the United States currently struggles to attract new physicians and to garner investments in infrastructure required to meet patients' needs. We believe that the absence of a robust overall strategy for the entire spectrum of primary care is a fundamental cause of these struggles. To address the absence of an overall strategy and vision for primary care, we offer a framework bas...

The current healthcare system is slowly evolving into a new system built on a vision of health promotion, primary care and community-based home care, with hospitals still being a core pillar of the healthcare system but not its primary service. This transformation requires a new approach to practice, namely, Strengths-Based Nursing Care (SBC). SBC is about mobilizing, capitalizing and developin...

OBJECTIVES UK primary care databases (PCDs) are used by researchers worldwide to inform clinical practice. These databases have been primarily tied to single clinical computer systems, but little is known about the adoption of these systems by primary care practices or their geographical representativeness. We explore the spatial distribution of clinical computing systems and discuss the implic...