The costs and effectiveness of asthma action plans for children were evaluated in a cross-sectional economic analysis. Direct health care and indirect costs, nights with symptoms, and asthma attacks were measured in 879 Ontario children with asthma. From a societal perspective, the total annual costs of the asthma action plan and the control groups were CDN$6,948 and CDN$6,140 per patient, resp...

At the heart of this magnificent transformation have been structural and organizational changes of a magnitude unprecedented in the long history of veterans’ health care. When we created 22 (now 21) Veterans Integrated Service Networks in 1995, we changed the way we allocated resources from individual facilities to geographic networks. This, in turn, enabled us to shift the emphasis in our care...

The objective of this study was to understand, from the perspective of health professionals, the meaning of playing/toys in the waiting room of a children's outpatient clinic. Semi-structured interviews were performed with 11 workers. A quantitative analysis of the data was performed around two themes: acknowledging the importance of playing/toys and dealing with limitations. Playing is seen as...

Biomedical research with human subjects has expanded outside of traditional medical centers and hospitals into other health care entities, such as rehabilitation facilities, free-standing out-patient treatment centers, and even home-health agencies. Regardless of the location, federal regulations mandate that all human-subjects research must be overseen by an institutional review board (IRB) or...

Background A number of developing countries have contracted out public health facilities to the Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) in order to improve service utilization. However, there is a paucity of in-depth qualitative information on barriers to access services as a result of contracting from service users’ perspective. The objective of this study was to explore perceived barriers to util...