OBJECTIVE To determine whether rewording postal reminder cards according to the "health belief model", a theory about preventive health behaviour, would help to improve measles vaccination rates. DESIGN A randomised controlled trial, with blind assessment of outcome status. Parents of children due for their first measles vaccination were randomised to one of two groups, one receiving the heal...

The Consortium for Educational Access, Transitions and Equity (CREATE) is a Research Programme Consortium supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). Its purpose is to undertake research designed to improve access to basic education in developing countries. It seeks to achieve this through generating new knowledge and encouraging its application through effective commun...

The concepts of health and health care are moving towards the notion of personalized preventive health maintenance and away from an exclusive focus on the cure of disease. This is against the backdrop of contemporary public health challenges that include increasing costs, worsening outcomes, 'diabesity' epidemics, and anticipated physician shortages. Personalized preventive medicine could be cr...

This paper reviews some of the evidence of success for preventive dentistry in the global context and presents some challenges for preventive dentistry in the coming years. Rather than attempting a detailed analysis of individual countries the global view looks at trends and patterns of prevention, care and disease in the context of demographic and other societal changes. In citing examples fro...

African Americans continue to suffer from health disparities. The Center for Minority Health (CMH) within the University of Pittsburgh has the mission to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities. CMH has designed and implemented the Family Health History (FHH) Initiative. The FHH Initiative places genetic-counseling graduate students in the African American community to provide risk asses...

Public health has been transforming less advantaged rural communities insub-SaharanAfricawitha focuson improving technologies, and providing skilledmanpower tomanage and maintain them. Meanwhile, development and health indicators have continued to slide or remain below optimal levels. This failure is blamed on factors such as civil conflict, corruption, and conservativeness of traditional commu...

Non-communicable diseases like diabetes, obesity and certain forms of cancer have been increasing in many countries at alarming levels. A difficulty in the conception of policies to reverse these trends is the identification of the drivers behind the global epidemics. Here, we implement a spatial spreading analysis to investigate whether non-communicable diseases like diabetes, obesity and canc...

The telehealth initiatives of the Department of Defense (DoD) and Veterans' Health Administration (VHA) continue to test the limits of technology to provide the best care to our service members, veterans and their families. The DoD and VHA have credentialing systems in place to allow clinical practice between facilities. New legislation in the form of the Servicemembers' Telemedicine and E-Heal...

The delivery of prevention services to children and adolescents through traditional healthcare settings is challenging for a variety of reasons. Parent- and community-focused services are typically not reimbursable in traditional medical settings, and personal healthcare services are often designed for acute and chronic medical treatment rather than prevention. To provide preventive services in...

Primary Care and Primary Health Care are very similar terms which are often employed interchangeably, but which are also used to denote quite different concepts. Much time and energy is spent discussing which term is the appropriate one for a particular application. There is a growing recognition internationally that the two terms describe two quite distinct entities. Recent Canadian uses of th...