BACKGROUND There is a paucity of literature examining the perceptions of Canadian pharmacists toward drug promotion by the pharmaceutical industry and pharmacist-industry interactions. OBJECTIVES To determine whether hospital pharmacists perceive their interactions with the pharmaceutical industry as influencing their clinical decision-making or that of their colleagues and whether hospital p...

BACKGROUND Choosing a medical specialty is a poorly understood process. Although studies conducted around the world have attempted to identify the factors that affect medical students' choice of specialty, data is scarce on the factors that influence the choice of specialty of Saudi Arabian medical students, in particular those planning a career in emergency medicine (EM). In this study, we inv...

The quality of reporting of cohort studies published in the most prestigious scientific medical journals was investigated to indicate to what extent the items in the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) checklist are addressed. Six top scientific medical journals with high impact factor were selected including New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of ...

OBJECTIVES To quantify patients' preferences for new pharmacist independent prescribing services in general practice for managing common existing long-term conditions compared with usual medical prescribing. METHODS A discrete choice experiment cross-sectional survey was conducted in five general practices in England (October-November 2009). Four service attributes reported on the length of c...

An important consideration in health service delivery is ensuring that services meet consumer needs. Whilst nursing services in primary care have grown internationally, there has been limited exploration of consumer satisfaction with these services. This paper reports a descriptive survey that sought to evaluate consumers' perceptions of New Zealand practice nurses (PNs). One thousand, five hun...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Since July 2002, family practice residency program accreditation requires evidence of teaching and assessing residents in six competency areas. This study was conducted to obtain baseline information about family practice graduates' perceptions of the importance of specific competencies and the extent to which residency training prepared them to perform skills represen...

OBJECTIVE To use a brief screening tool to identify knee pain (all knee pain, non-chronic and chronic knee pain) and associated health-care use in the general population aged 50 yr and over. METHODS A cross-sectional survey was mailed to 8995 individuals registered with three general practices in North Staffordshire, UK. The questionnaire included a Knee Pain Screening Tool (KNEST), the Short...

Continued sea-level rise and coastal development have led to considerable concerns on coastline changes along inhabited islands. Analysis of long-term coastline changes of islands is however limited due to unavailable data and the cost of field work. In this study, high-resolution images taken from 1970–2011 at an interval of about 10 years and topographic maps were collected to determine coast...

This paper presents a discriminative reranking model for the discourse segmentation task, the first step in a discourse parsing system. Our model exploits subtree features to rerank Nbest outputs of a base segmenter, which uses syntactic and lexical features in a CRF framework. Experimental results on the RST Discourse Treebank corpus show that our model outperforms existing discourse segmenter...

INTRODUCTION The purpose of this study was to conduct an online survey of chiropractic students in the 2011/12 academic year at CMCC in order to determine their attitudes toward vaccination, their history of vaccination and their opinions towards their level of preparedness and confidence to discuss vaccination with patients. METHOD All students enrolled in the program at CMCC were eligible t...