BACKGROUND Gatekeeper policy, requiring a patient to visit a primary care provider first, and the patient needs to get his or her primary care provider's referral before seeing a specialist or going to a hospital, has been implemented in China for about ten years, and it is necessary to assess the patients' acceptance of gatekeeper policy and to explore the factors influencing patients' accepta...

Many rural communities across canada are facing challenges to the sustainability of core emergency and acute care health services, primarily due to problems with medical and nursing staffing. Data related to service efficacy and effectiveness are not well organized. Most of Canada still relies on reporting by large geopolitical areas (local health areas) that do not always relate natural catchm...

BACKGROUND Health care system reform is a major issue in many countries and therefore how to evaluate the effects of changes is incredibly important. This study measured residents' satisfaction with community health care service in Shanghai, China, and aimed to evaluate the effect of recent health care system reform. METHODS Face-to-face interviews were performed with a stratified random samp...

Indices of deprivation based upon the characteristics of areas of residence are widely used in epidemiology and public health, and have a number of possible applications. Firstly, they may be used when data describing a person’s socioeconomic circumstances have not been, or cannot be, collected directly. Secondly, they may inform the distribution of health service resources, for primary care, c...

BACKGROUND This project is a community-level study of equity of access to eye health services for Indigenous Australians. METHODS The project used data on eye health services from multiple sources including Medicare Australia, inpatient and outpatient data and the National Indigenous Eye Health Survey.The analysis focused on the extent to which access to eye health services varied at an area ...

PURPOSE Shenzhen is the first pilot city in China implementing the gatekeeper policy, with community health service (CHS) centers as the gatekeepers. We aim to investigate patient satisfaction with this policy and its influencing factors in Shenzhen. METHODS 3,848 patients visiting eight CHS centers in Shenzhen of China between May 1 and July 28, 2013 were recruited. We interviewed them using...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE This study aimed to investigate the knowledge of community general practitioners (GPs) and nurses about pre-hospital stroke recognition, treatment and management and secondary stroke prevention; to identify the sociodemographic and educational factors influencing knowledge. METHODS A self-designed test questionnaire was applied in a self-administered close-exam setting ...

Reference Guy, D. 2002. “Survey: A Public Preference for Home Care.” Healthcare Quarterly 6(2): 32-32 About the Author Cathy Hecimovich, BHSc. PT, MEd., CHE, has been an active employee in the health services field for over 20 years. Ms. Hecimovich is currently Senior Director of Client Services at the Mississauga Halton Community Care Access Centre (CCAC). Cathy Hecimovich Home Care’s Unique C...

OBJECTIVE To compare the rate of provision of longer consultations per head of population across practice locations categorised by socioeconomic status. DESIGN Retrospective analysis of Medicare data for all consultations for all general practitioners in Australia for the 1998-99 and 1999-2000 financial years, grouped by postcode of practice location. Postcodes were categorised by the Socio-E...