BACKGROUND The employment of physician assistants (PAs) is a strategy to improve access to care. Since the new millennium, a handful of countries have turned to PAs as a means to bridge the growing gap between the supply and demand of medical services. However, little is known about this new workforce entity from the patient's perspective. The objective of this study was to assess the willingne...

background we aimed to identify the indicators of healthcare fraud and abuse in general physicians’ drug prescription claims, and to identify a subset of general physicians that were more likely to have committed fraud and abuse.   methods we applied data mining approach to a major health insurance organization dataset of private sector general physicians’ prescription claims. it involved 5 ste...

INTRODUCTION Maintaining hospital consultant staffing levels often requires the employment of locum tenens to meet service needs. This is particularly so in hospitals where core clinical services are run by a small number of permanently appointed consultants. The problems associated with locum employment are underestimated and little attention has been directed towards addressing the issue in t...

Most physicians will probably identify no more than one or two cases of porphyria during their career, but will have excluded the diagnosis in many more and thus have a high threshold for contemplating the diagnosis. It is an increasingly important diagnosis to make because prevention of attacks is essential, effective treatments are available, and family studies and medico-legal issues are of ...