The north west England faculty patients' liaison group, supported by community health councils and family practitioner committees, surveyed patients' perceptions of accessibility to general practitioners in seven districts in 1985 and 1986. Findings on appointment systems, telephone access and out-of-hours calls are compared with those from other surveys. The results show that patients' satisfa...

A Publication of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research More than 2.24 million low-income adults in California cannot always afford to put food on the table, and as a result, almost one out of three of these adults, 658,000, experiences episodes of hunger. This is a sad reality in a state that has the largest agricultural economy in the United States and produces abundant highquality fruits...

BACKGROUND Telephone survey (TS) has been a popular tool for conducting health surveys, particularly in developed countries. However, the feasibility, and reliability of TS are not adequately explored in Sri Lanka. The main aim of this study is to assess the effectiveness of telephone-based survey in estimating the prevalence of common non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in Sri Lanka. METHODS We...

The aim of this study was to investigate the reliability of obtaining through mailed surveys maternal reports of specific major motor milestones achievement. To accomplish this aim we compared and contrasted mailed survey data and telephone interview data on a series of questions about age at which motor milestones were achieved. We used monthly telephone interviews with mothers of 238 twin pai...

BACKGROUND Households with fixed-line telephones have decreased while mobile (cell) phone ownership has increased. We therefore sought to examine the feasibility of recruiting young women for a national health survey through random digit dialling mobile phones. METHODS Two samples of women aged 18 to 39 years were surveyed by random digit dialling fixed and mobile numbers. We compared partici...

The internet is increasingly being used for cross-sectional surveys and online panels . Although internet accessibility is growing across developed and developing countries, it seems unlikely that the internet alone will ever provide complete coverage of the general population . Given the incomplete coverage and imbalanced penetration rate of the internet across segments of the population, it i...

Incorrect beliefs about memory have wide-ranging implications. We recently reported the results of a survey showing that a substantial proportion of the United States public held beliefs about memory that conflicted with those of memory experts. For that survey, respondents answered recorded questions using their telephone keypad. Although such robotic polling produces reliable results that acc...

BACKGROUND The School Health Policies and Programs Study (SHPPS) is a national study periodically conducted to assess school health policies and programs at the state, district, school, and classroom levels. For SHPPS 2006, district-level questionnaires were designed for telephone administration, but mixed-mode data collection that also used paper-and-pencil mail questionnaires was required to ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Patient satisfaction is of paramount importance when delivering a patient-centered service. Our hospital has been a center for the use of radioiodine to treat thyrotoxicosis for several years, but we began carrying out patient satisfaction surveys and implementing changes after 2008. The aim of the project reported here was to assess patient satisfaction with our radioi...