P ractice redesign efforts to improve the efficiency of primary care practice and increase the volume of patients primary care providers are able to care for must take into account all tasks associated with the provision of care, including those outside the faceto-face encounter that often go unrecognized. In the present study, we empirically measured a wide breadth of outpatient care tasks ass...

This paper provides a description of the nature of hospital sector, with an emphasis on private hospital sector, in Madras city. It highlights some of the characteristics of the hospital sector, namely its size, distribution, range of services offered, manpower employed, and price differentials for outpatient care. A preliminary comparison of 35 private hospitals suggests presence of price-comp...

BACKGROUND Encouraged by the increased purchasing power of general practitioners (GPs), specialist-run clinics in general practice and community health care settings (known as specialist outreach clinics) have increased rapidly across England. The activities of local commissioning schemes within primary care groups are likely to accelerate this trend. AIM To evaluate the costs, processes, and...

RATIONALE, AIMS AND OBJECTIVES Complex and chronic disease is placing significant pressure on hospital outpatient departments. Novel ways of delivering care have been developed recently and are often described as 'triage' services. This paper reviews the literature pertaining to definitions and descriptions of orthopaedic/musculoskeletal triage processes, in order to provide information on 'bes...

The majority of patient safety and quality research has focused on the inpatient setting, leaving a lack of intervention-based research in patient safety and quality for the ambulatory setting. There were an estimated 1.1 billion ambulatory visits in the US in 2010 with this number expecting to rise due to the shift from inpatient to outpatient care and the aging population. Given these numbers...

OBJECTIVE This report describes ambulatory care visits to hospital outpatient departments in the United States. Statistics are presented on selected hospital, clinic, patient, and visit characteristics. METHODS The data presented in this report were collected from the 1997 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS). NHAMCS is part of the ambulatory care component of the Nationa...

BACKGROUND Reinforcing the gatekeeping role of general practitioners (GPs) by embedding specialist knowledge into primary care is seen as a possibility for stimulating a more sustainable healthcare system and avoiding unnecessary referrals to outpatient care. An intervention called Primary Care Plus (PC+) was developed to achieve these goals. The objective of this study is to gain insight into:...

BACKGROUND Epilepsy is a common neurological disorder, with over 80 % of cases found in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Studies from high-income countries find a significant economic burden associated with epilepsy, yet few studies from LMICs, where out-of-pocket costs for general healthcare can be substantial, have assessed out-of-pocket costs and health care utilization for outpatie...