CONTEXT Chronically homeless adults with severe mental illness are heavy users of costly inpatient and emergency psychiatric services. Full-service partnerships (FSPs) provide housing and engage clients in treatment. OBJECTIVE To examine changes in recovery outcomes, mental health service use and costs, and quality of life associated with participation in FSPs. DESIGN A quasi-experimental, ...

PURPOSE Our purpose in the current study was to examine the relationship between health services utilization delivered by means of the Homeless Outreach Medical Services (HOMES) program and health services utilization delivered by means of the Parkland emergency room and inpatient units among a sample of older and younger homeless adults being served by the Parkland Health and Hospital System. ...

The international data have indicated a growing trend of alcohol use worldwide during recent years. Although alcohol use is against cultural norms and religious law in Iran, anecdotal reports from substance abuse treatment providers show that there is demand for alcohol treatment in the country. A recent national report also documented alcohol use disorders in Iran. Development and implementati...

This study aimed to investigate differences in healthcare service utilization between patients with and those without benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) using Taiwan's National Health Insurance population-based database. A total of 7413 patients with BPH and 7413 age-matched patients without BPH were included. The outcome variable was 1-year utilization of healthcare services including the numb...

OBJECTIVE To examine whether community treatment orders for psychiatric patients reduce subsequent use of health services in comparison with control patients not placed on an order. DESIGN Epidemiological study with a before and after, two stage design of matching and multivariate analysis, controlling for sociodemographic variables, clinical features, and psychiatric history. SETTING All c...

BACKGROUND As an important outcome of the health system, equity in health service utilization has attracted an increasing amount of attention in the literature on health reform in China in recent years. The poor, who frequently require more services, are often the least able to pay, while the wealthy utilize disproportionately more services although they have less need. Whereas equity in health...

BACKGROUND There are few reports on the effects of extensive decentralization of mental health services. We investigated the total patterns of utilization in a local-bed model and a central-bed model. METHODS In a time-trend case-registry design, 7635 single treatment episodes, from the specialist and municipality services in 2003-2006, were linked to 2975 individual patients over all adminis...

BACKGROUND Many households in low- and middle-income countries face financial hardships due to payments for health care, while others are pushed into poverty. Risk pooling and prepayment mechanisms help to lessen the impact of the costs of care as well as assisting to achieve universal health coverage (UHC). Ghana implemented the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) for the promotion of acce...

Background and objective The achievement of universal health coverage (UHC) in emerging economies is a high priority within the global community. This timely study uses standardized national population data collected from adults aged 50 and older in China, Ghana, India, Mexico, the Russian Federation, and South Africa. The objective is to describe health care utilization and measure association...

background this paper aims to investigate the development trend of traditional chinese medicine (tcm) hospitals in china and explore their medical service innovations, with special reference to the changing co-existence with western medicine (wm) at tcm hospitals.   methods quantitative data at macro level was collected from official databases of china health statistical yearbook and extracts o...