Organisational audit of public health in the United Kingdom is rare. To provide a framework for a structured organisational audit in district public health departments in one region organisational factors contributing to efficient, high quality work were identified and compared between districts, enabling each department to identify its organisational strengths and weaknesses. A draft list of o...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Previous studies of expert physical therapists have sampled therapists based on years of clinical experience or reputation, not on their patients' clinical outcomes. The purposes of this study were to identify expert physical therapists by using patient self-reported outcomes and to describe the characteristics of clinicians whose patients with lumbar spine syndromes repo...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To compare the health status and factors influencing the health of populations that had previously lived under different political systems. DESIGN Cross sectional health and social survey using postal interviews. The relation between self reported health and psychosocial factors (stressful life events, social support, education, health promoting life style and health endangeri...

The prevalence of alcohol, drug, and tobacco use among US middle-aged and older adults is increasing. A subset of this population uses substances to cope with stress, but the characteristics of these individuals, and the association between substance-use coping and health outcomes remain unclear. We identified correlates of substance-use coping and measured its association with self-rated healt...

The links between two commonly used measures of health-self-rated health (SRH) and self-reported illness (SRI)-and socio-economic and contextual factors are poorly understood in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) and more specifically among women in conflict areas. This study assesses the socioeconomic determinants of three self-reported measures of health among women in the occupied Pales...

Accurate data on primary care activity is key to health services planning and reconfiguration. Official data estimate general practice adult consultation rates to be 3.2 visits annually, based on patient self reports. We aim to estimate the consultation rate using practice based data and compare this to official estimates. We interrogated six general practices' information systems and estimated...

BACKGROUND Development of resistance to first line antimalarials led to recommendation of artemisinin based combination therapies (ACTs). High adherence to ACTs provided by community health workers (CHWs) gave reassurance that community based interventions did not increase the risk of drug resistance. Integrated community case management of illnesses (ICCM) is now recommended through which chil...

In 3 experiments, the authors tested the effect of perceived social consensus on attitudes toward obese people. Participants completed self-report measures of attitudes toward obese people prior to and after manipulated consensus feedback depicting attitudes of others. In Study 1 (N=60), participants decreased negative and increased positive stereotypes after learning that others held more favo...

STUDY OBJECTIVES To assess the relative contribution of age and social class to variations in the prevalence of a selection of self reported health problems. To examine the implications of observed variations for research on health inequalities. DESIGN Secondary analysis of the Health Survey for England (1991-1997) using morbidities that are particularly prone to class effects. A statistical ...

BACKGROUND An individual's current status of physical activity and nutrition and readiness to change can be determined using PACE assessment forms. Practitioners have suggested that feedback on the fitness and health components can produce a change in a subject's awareness of their behaviour and thereby lead to a beneficial change in stage of behaviour change. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the short ...