OBJECTIVE Studies show a high potential demand for psychiatric advance directives but low completion rates. The authors conducted a randomized study of a structured, manualized intervention to facilitate completion of psychiatric advance directives. METHOD A total of 469 patients with severe mental illness were randomly assigned to a facilitated psychiatric advance directive session or a cont...

BACKGROUND As China re-establishes its health insurance system through various cooperative schemes, little is known about schoolchildren's health insurance. This paper reports findings from a study that examined schoolchildren's insurance coverage, disparities between farmer and non-farmer households, and effects of low-premium cooperative schemes on healthcare access and utilization. It also d...

Introduction There is a widespread perception that managed care organisations (MCOs) are not particularly interested in providing disease prevention and health promotion services consisting primarily of behavioural interventions. The belief is that MCO managers see the cost associated with such interventions, but not the eVectiveness and not the cost-eVectiveness. Indeed, they may be looking fo...

This paper purposed a Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) system which can automatically detect and classified the traffic signs in traffic scene images acquired from a moving car. First it uses color based segmentation and then further refines the segments using two shape detection based techniques. A color description technique is used to extract the sign information from the segmented part which ...

BACKGROUND Introduction of Flexible Assertive Community Treatment (FACT) may be associated with increased remission rates and changes in patterns of care. The present paper reports on differences in psychosocial functioning and health care use between patients in FACT and two groups of patients not currently provided with a specific model of community service. METHODS The ongoing "Pharmacothe...

OBJECTIVE To describe the development, validity and application of a new instrument (PREPARED) for obtaining feedback from community consumers of discharge planning activities. DESIGN Iterative qualitative and quantitative investigations. SETTING The community catchment area of a metropolitan Australian tertiary public hospital. STUDY PARTICIPANTS Patients aged over 65 years, with a range...

Most ectotherms show an inverse relationship between developmental temperature and body size, a phenomenon known as the temperature-size rule (TSR). Several competing hypotheses have been proposed to explain its occurrence. According to one set of views, the TSR results from inevitable biophysical effects of temperature on the rates of growth and differentiation, whereas other views suggest the...

Visualization of temporal event data is increasingly important for the analysis of a broad range of data including electronic health records, web logs, and financial data. In many analytic tasks, users need the capability to manipulate the data to reveal patterns and make insights. To support this analytic need, we introduce a novel temporal search and replace tool (TSR) implemented in our exis...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the virtual importance of identified barriers to preventive interventions and to explore the association between physicians' characteristics and their attitudes towards prevention. METHODS We conducted a cross-sectional survey of 182 randomly selected family and general physicians (164/182=90% response rate) from total of 385 general physicians from 5 health sectors o...

annually, 4.7% of people aged 15-64 (184 million people) consume illegal drugs globally which is associated with numerous social and individual harms. according to expanded physical, psychological and social complications of addiction, treatment methods must include a combination of medical, psychological and social care. in terms of oral health, addiction aggravates direct or indirect oral pro...