Survey Ratings At the end of 2008, in its 12th year of publication, The Permanente Journal (TPJ) conducted its fifth reader survey and found continued high satisfaction. Of the 2910 respondents—70% physicians, 15% clinicians, 11% nurses, 4% academics, researchers, leaders, managers—33% rated TPJ “excellent,” 49% “good,” 12% “average,” 4% “fair,” and 2% “poor.” Overall satisfaction was 94% (incl...

We conducted a population-based mail survey and prospectively compared mortality between respondents and non-respondents. Age-adjusted mortality rates for all causes were higher among non-respondents than among respondents in both sexes. Age-adjusted rate ratios were 1.50 for males and 1.33 for females. Non-respondents also had, in both sexes, higher mortality for three leading causes of death,...

SCOPE Probiotic interventions are known to have been shown to influence the composition of the intestinal microbiota in geriatrics. The growing concern is the apparent variation in response to identical strain dosage among human volunteers. One factor that governs this variation is the host gut microbiome. In this study, we attempted to define a core gut metagenome, which could act as a predisp...

BACKGROUND Surveys are often used for analysis of health status and healthcare utilization in different socioeconomic groups. However, differential non-response rates may bias results. The aim of this study was to compare register data on outpatient healthcare utilization among respondents to a health survey to that of the total population and to investigate whether socioeconomic differences in...

This study examined if administering an employee satisfaction survey using the Internet affected the rates or quality of employees’ participation. 644 hospital employees were randomly assigned to complete a satisfaction survey using either a Web survey or a traditional paper measure. Response rates were relatively high across both modes. No evidence for a very large difference in response rates...