BACKGROUND Ethiopia has implemented a nationwide primary health program (the Health Extension Program) at the grassroots level since 2003. The aim of the program is to increase public access to basic health services, mainly by producing model households. These are households which attend at least 75% of the training given by health extension workers and implement at least 75% of the Health Exte...

BACKGROUND Providing community-based mental health services is crucial and is an agreed plan between the Iranian Mental Health Office and the Regional Committee for the Eastern Mediterranean (affiliated with WHO). The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of home-visit clinical case-management services on the hospitalization rate and other clinical outcomes in patients with sever...

OBJECTIVE To compare the yield of active tuberculosis (TB) case detection among risk groups during home visits with passive detection among patients at health services. METHODS In April 2004, in a first phase, we introduced, active screening for coughing among all family members of patients that were visited at home by their family doctor or nurse for other reasons. Subsequently, from October...

OBJECTIVE With a quasi-experimental design, this study aims to assess whether the Zero-markup Policy for Essential Drugs (ZPED) reduces the medical expense for patients at county hospitals, the major healthcare provider in rural China. METHODS Data from Ningshan county hospital and Zhenping county hospital, China, include 2014 outpatient records and 9239 inpatient records. Quantitative method...

CONTEXT The annual physical examination is a staple of North American medicine. Medicare does not pay for such visits, and the United States Preventive Services Task Force designates these visits as preventive services. OBJECTIVE To understand the expectations of receptionists, patients, and physicians as well as their reasons for scheduling a health maintenance visit and to clarify the expec...

OBJECTIVE Breast-feeding counselling has been identified as the intervention with the greatest potential for reducing child deaths, but there is little experience in delivering breast-feeding counselling at scale within routine health systems. The study aim was to compare rates of exclusive breast-feeding associated with a breast-feeding counselling intervention in which community health agents...

In this cross-sectional study we explained the possible determinants of satisfaction with access to health services in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Of the 2000 randomly selected Estonian adult patients with RA, a total 1259 completed the survey. Regression analysis was used to analyse the predictors of patients' satisfaction with access to health services. Half of the respondents we...

OBJECTIVE The authors measured use of mental health services among young people before and during incarceration. METHODS Administrative data were used to describe mental health services received by 13,919 youths and young adults (ages 12-24) while incarcerated in Ontario, Canada, correctional centers (physician visits, April 1, 2010-March 31, 2012) and, for a subset of the population, during ...

BACKGROUND Clinicians cannot provide all recommended preventive services in a single office visit and must learn to prioritize. This skill is not overtly addressed in medical school. METHODS We designed a workshop to teach third-year medical students to prioritize preventive services during an office visit. In a prospective controlled trial, we compared performance on a standardized patient c...