background: preconception counseling is preventive medicine in obstetrics. preconception care creates an opportunity for examining conditions before pregnancy improving pregnancy outcome. this study was conducted with the aim of determining the adaptation rate of preconception care with the national standards at health care centers, ahvaz, 2014. methods: this descriptive study was conducted at ...

recognizing the advantages of primary care as a means of improving the entire health system, this text comments on reforms of publicly funded primary health centers, and the rapid development of private forprofit providers in sweden. many goals and expectations are connected to such reforms, which equally require critical analyses of scarce resources, professional trust/motivation and business ...

conclusions the quality gap in the services provided by maternity units showed that these units are not able to meet pregnant women’s expectations completely. the negative quality gaps can be used as a guideline to improve the maternal health care quality and reduce maternal mortality, particularly in high-risk women such as those living in rural areas. results there was a negative gap in all d...

background: the provision of accurate and timely drug information to health care professionals is an important mechanism to promote safe and effective drug therapy for patients. world’s drug and poison information centers (dpics) are mainly affiliated to hospitals, rather rarely with faculties of pharmacy or with faculties of medicine and other related organizations. methods: data was collected...

background: diabetes is a leading cause of cardiovascular disease (cvd). moreover, cvd accounts for primary cause of death among diabetic patients. physicians, especially in the primary care setting, have effective role in the management of cardiovascular risk factors. therefore, we aimed to compare the prevalence of modifiable cardiovascular risk factors in type 2 diabetic patients attending t...

Medical assistants (MAs) have always been vital to the effective operation of our primary care clinic. Each physician in our university-based, hospital-run clinic has an assigned MA, and a good MA can make a clinic day run smoothly. One who is not efficient or does not understand the physician’s work process, however, can slow down the whole clinic and make a workday very frustrating. Surprisin...

Rapid HIV testing was approved in Australia in December 2012. Data was collected to describe the early experience of using rapid testing in Australia but as the information was collected, the authors noted that there appeared to be a high rate of HIV diagnoses amongst rapid testers. Further analysis confirmed this impression, when the rate was compared to a baseline rate of HIV diagnoses over t...

Impoverished communities often turn to illegal extraction of resources from protected areas to alleviate economic pressures or to make monetary gains. Such practices can cause ecological damage and threaten animal populations. These communities also often face a high disease burden and typically do not have access to affordable health care. Here we argue that these two seemingly separate challe...

This article characterizes the problem of violence against health professionals in the workplace (VAHPITWP) in selected settings in Portugal. It addresses the questions of what types of violence are most frequent and who are the most affected health professionals.Three methodological approaches were followed: (i) documentary studies, (ii) a questionnaire-based hospital and health centre (HC) co...