The growing rehabilitation and consumer movement toward independent community living for disabled adults has placed new demands on the health care delivery system. Programs must be developed for the disabled adult that provide direct training in adaptive community skills, such as banking, budgeting, consumer advocacy, personal health care, and attendant management. An Independent Living Skills ...

It is increasingly suggested that political advocacy is a core professional responsibility for physicians. The author argues that this is an error. Advocacy on behalf of societal goals, even those goals as unexceptionable as the betterment of human health, is inevitably political. Claims that political advocacy are a professional responsibility are mistaken, the author argues, because (1) civic...

BACKGROUND Youth advocacy has been successfully used in substance use prevention but is a novel strategy in obesity prevention. As a precondition for building an evidence base for youth advocacy for obesity prevention, the present study aimed to develop and evaluate measures of youth advocacy mediator, process, and outcome variables. METHODS The Youth Engagement and Action for Health (YEAH!) ...

Family Health Advocate at http://www.familyhealthadvocate.org/ was created as part of the Academy’s “bold champion” initiative to support the AAFP’s legislative advocacy agenda with consumers. The site’s purpose is to inform patients and consumers about the Academy’s advocacy issues and to motivate them to make their voices heard about those issues on family physicians’ behalf. According to inf...

Debate about the nature and appropriateness of advocacy by environmental scientists is important--it represents understanding the role of these citizens in our society. Much has been written about advocacy by scientists, and that literature describes substantial diversity in reasons why advocacy by scientists is or is not appropriate. Despite the nature of this literature there has been no comp...

It is difficult to disagree with the general argument that successful health reform requires a significant degree of policy capacity or that all players in the policy game need to move beyond self-interested advocacy. However, an overly broad definition of policy capacity is a problem. More important perhaps, health reform inevitably requires not just policy capacity but political leadership an...

As a community, physicians with expertise in child development and an appreciation of school-related challenges are uniquely positioned to enhcince the well-being of children with specific learning disabilities. Efforts in such areas as differential diagnosis, enhancing communication between home and school and among parents and related service providers, accountability for effective and timely...