OBJECTIVE To determine quality of hip fracture services provided by "generalist" general surgeons (generalists) in Nova Scotia. DESIGN Chart review and postoperative, blinded, random-ordered radiologic analysis. SETTING Three community hospitals and 1 tertiary care hospital in Nova Scotia. PARTICIPANTS Seven generalists who performed 120 hip fracture repairs and 7 orthopedic surgeons (spe...

Introduced over 200 yr ago to the east coast of North America, Carcinus maenas now ranges from New York to Newfoundland. In the 1980s, a secondary invasion of European lineages, termed northern haplotypes, occurred in Nova Scotia. Young-of-the-year sampled in 2007 revealed that northern haplotypes were present in low frequencies at several northwestern Atlantic sites as far south as New York; a...

A mainstay vice of the teenage years — smoking — is becoming markedly less popular in Nova Scotia, the province’s fourth annual drug use survey indicates. The 2002 survey found that 23% of teenage students smoke cigarettes, a 13% drop from 1998, and the proportion of regular teen smokers — those who have more than 10 cigarettes a day — dipped to 4% from 7%. Overall, the percentage of students w...

OBJECTIVE To assess the affordability of a nutritious diet for households earning minimum wage in Nova Scotia. METHODS Food costing data were collected in 43 randomly selected grocery stores throughout NS in 2002 using the National Nutritious Food Basket (NNFB). To estimate the affordability of a nutritious diet for households earning minimum wage, average monthly costs for essential expenses...

BACKGROUND The frailty index (FI) is used to measure the health status of ageing individuals. An FI is constructed as the proportion of deficits present in an individual out of the total number of age-related health variables considered. The purpose of this study was to systematically assess whether dichotomizing deficits included in an FI affects the information value of the whole index. MET...

OBJECTIVES A small proportion of pediatric sport- and recreation-related injuries are serious enough to be considered "major trauma." However, the immediate and long-term consequences in cases of pediatric major trauma are significant and potentially life-threatening. The objective of this study was to describe the incidence and outcomes of pediatric major traumas related to sport and recreatio...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether school connectedness demonstrated an independent protective association with risk of depression in students in grades 10 to 12 attending a high school in a rural community in southwestern Nova Scotia. METHODS Students at a high school in rural Nova Scotia participated in a self-completion survey in May 2009. Students were asked about a wide range of health-relat...

The number of third-party independent medical examinations is increasing, and so is the controversy surrounding them. Dorothy Grant of the Medical Society of Nova Scotia provides advice on how physicians should address this potentially contentious issue.

BACKGROUND Maternal characteristics such as age, parity, smoking status, pre-pregnancy weight and pregnancy weight gain have changed in many industrialized countries in recent years. Many of these changes have not been adequately described at a population level. The purpose of this study was to describe recent trends in selected maternal characteristics in Nova Scotia. METHODS Data from a pop...