OBJECTIVE Although there are training guidelines to credential emergency physicians in bedside ultrasound, many faculty groups have members who completed residency without a mandatory curriculum. These physicians are therefore required to learn bedside ultrasound while out in practice. The objective of this descriptive report is to illustrate a single academic facility's experience with acquiri...

OBJECTIVE To determine patients' preferences for a shared or directed style of consultation in the decision making part of the general practice consultation. DESIGN Structured interview, with video vignettes of acted consultations. SETTING 5 practices in Lothian, Scotland. PARTICIPANTS 410 patients (adults and adults accompanying children) attending surgery appointments. MAIN OUTCOME ME...

IMPORTANCE The Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE)--formerly called the dean's letter--is an important tool for residency program directors to use in assessing student qualifications for both invitation to interview and construction of their rank order list. Many institutions are now allowing students to construct their own Unique Characteristics (UC) section for the MSPE. This study ...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to provide new information that describes chiropractors' professional identity relative to their perceived clinical role as specialist or generalist. METHODS A pragmatic, descriptive, cross-sectional survey was performed of randomly sampled state-board licensed chiropractors in the United States during the period 2002-2003 to assess the chiropractors' p...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether there is an association between sex and academic rank and track, leadership, productivity, income, and career satisfaction. DESIGN National cross-sectional survey. SETTING Academic dermatologists across the United States. PARTICIPANTS A total of 1263 full-time academic dermatologists. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES The association of sex with the following predicti...

—Near Field Communication (NFC) is deemed to be a future technology with a lot of potential in many areas. One of those areas, learning and teaching, will be covered in this article, showing possible usages of NFC with teaching and learning materials. With a lot of new NFC capable devices presented recently, this technology can be utilized in many areas, including the arbitrarily growing field ...

A workshop cosponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health was convened in Washington, DC, on 17-18 October 2001 with the goal of developing a consensus document on the most appropriate experimental approaches and assays available to assess developmental immunotoxicity. The work group was composed of scientists...

BACKGROUND Both musculoskeletal pain-intensity in relation to a specific location (e.g. lower back or shoulder) and pain in multiple body regions have been shown to be associated with impaired function and sickness absence, but the impact of pain intensity on the association between widespread pain and sickness absence has not been studied. Additionally it is unknown whether care-seeking in gen...

BACKGROUND There is a growing literature suggesting that access to cardiology services is affected by age. However, there is a dearth of studies that have considered age and sex in conjunction. AIM This study aims to examine the impact of age, and its interaction with sex, on reported healthcare seeking, based on responses to symptom vignettes, in an attempt to standardise symptomatology acro...

AIM To investigate the quality of general practice care in Croatia by using patient enablement as a consultation outcome measure and its association with patient, physician, and practice characteristics. METHODS A cross-sectional questionnaire-based study performed from November 2003 to March 2004 included a national stratified random sample of 350 general practitioners, who were asked to col...