Canadians provide significant amounts of unpaid care to elderly family members and friends with long-term health problems. While some information is available on the nature of the tasks unpaid caregivers perform, and the amounts of time they spend on these tasks, the contribution of unpaid caregivers is often hidden. (It is recognized that some caregiving may be for short periods of time or may...

BACKGROUND The World Health Organization (WHO) has argued that functioning, and, more concretely, functioning domains constitute the operationalization that best captures our intuitive notion of health. Functioning is, therefore, a major public-health goal. A great deal of data about functioning is already available. Nonetheless, it is not possible to compare and optimally utilize this informat...

Lifestyle interventions (i.e., diet and/or physical activity) are effective in delaying or preventing the onset of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. However, policymakers must know the cost-effectiveness of such interventions before implementing them at the large-scale population level. This review discusses various issues (e.g., characteristics, modeling, and long-term effectiveness) in the...

In the last few decades, significant progress has been made in improving population health outcomes. This is largely attributable to the development of effective public-health tools—diagnostics, vaccines, other prevention technologies, and treatment regimens. Advances in delivery have enabled these technologies and interventions to reach end users in even the most remote areas. However, althoug...

This article discusses Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) in the social sciences. After a brief outline of the discussion, the work of William Herbert Dray (1921-2009) is examined. Dray, partly following Collingwood, worked on different forms of causality and methodology in historical explanation (in comparison to the social sciences), based on a distinction between causes and reasons. Dray's ladder...

BACKGROUND With ambitious new UNAIDS targets to end AIDS by 2030, and new WHO treatment guidelines, there is increased interest in the best way to scale-up ART coverage. We investigate the cost-effectiveness of various ART scale-up options in Uganda. METHODS Individual-based HIV/ART model of Uganda, calibrated using history matching. 22 ART scale-up strategies were simulated from 2016 to 2030...

The authors present a new transcript-based method for the assessment of therapeutic alliance ruptures and resolutions in psychotherapy-the Collaborative Interaction Scale (CIS)-and discuss the structure and theoretical background of the scale and the rating procedure. To assess interrater reliability, three raters independently evaluated 32 psychotherapy sessions (2,984 patient utterances and 2...

BACKGROUND Much implementation research is focused on full-scale trials with little evidence of preceding modelling work. The Medical Research Council Framework for developing and evaluating complex interventions has argued for more and better theoretical and exploratory work prior to a trial as a means of improving intervention development. Intervention modelling experiments (IMEs) are a way o...

Background. Despite improvements in child health, Afghanistan still has a heavy burden of deaths due to preventable causes: 17% of under-5 deaths are due to pneumonia and 12% are due to diarrhoea. Objective. This article describes the situation of childhood pneumonia and diarrhoea in Afghanistan, including efforts to prevent, protect, and treat the two diseases. It estimates lives saved by scal...

abstract background: fatigue is the most common and highly disabling symptom of multiple sclerosis (ms) that has negative effects on employment, the process of socialization, compliance with the disease, and other factors effective on activities of daily living. the usage of complementary and alternative medicine methods in ms patients is higher than in the general population. however, there is...