TO THE EDITOR: Doctor fish (Garra rufa) are freshwater cyprinid fish that naturally inhabit river basins in central Eurasia. They are widely used in the health and beauty industries in foot spas for ichthyotherapy (Kangal fish therapy or doctor fish therapy) (Figure; Technical Appendix Figure 1) (1). During these sessions, ...

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Social network analysis is an approach to study the interactions and exchange of resources among people. It can help understanding the underlying structural and behavioral complexities that influence the process of capacity building towards evidence-informed decision making. A social network analysis was conducted to understand if and how ...

A personally controlled health records (PCHR) system allows a patient user to share his/her health records with trusted physicians by manually granting them the access privilege to his/her online records. However, it presents the problem of emergency access in situations where the user is physically unable to grant the access ...

ABSTRACT: INTRODUCTION: Despite the importance of political institutions in shaping the social environment, the causal impact of politics on health care access and inequalities has been understudied. Even when considered, research tends to focus on the effects of formal macro-political institutions such as the welfare state. We investigate how micro-politics ...

We analyzed the characteristics of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) who reported unmet oral health needs since testing positive and compared those characteristics with people reporting no unmet health needs. We also identified barriers to accessing oral health care for PLWHA. We collected data from 2,469 HIV-positive patients who had ...

The Brazilian population lacks equitable access to specialized health care and diagnostic tests, especially in remote municipalities, where health professionals often feel isolated and staff turnover is high. Telehealth has the potential to improve patients' access to specialized health care, but little is known about it in terms of cost-effectiveness, ...

As part of a cluster of articles leading up to the 2012 World Health Report and critically reflecting on the theme of "no health without research," Suerie Moon and colleagues argue for a global health R&D treaty to improve innovation in new medicines and strengthening affordability, sustainable financing, efficiency in ...

The global economic and financial crisis is having and impact on the Italian healthcare system which is undergoing a devolution process from the central government to regions and where about one third of the regional governments (mainly in the central and southern part of the country) are facing large financial ...

Background  A number of expert reports have pointed to serious problems with health care in many Latin American countries and argued the need to reform and improve health-care systems. In addition, the Ministers of Health of the Americas have stated that health systems should be accountable to citizens. Objective  This ...

A GROUP OF 60 PREDOMINANTLY Black and Latino students in Boston, Massachusetts, between the ages of 11 and 15 years, recognized trash and neighborhood squalor as a threat to their well-being and health. These youths were participants in Nuestro Futuro Saludable (NFS), an afterschool intervention designed to engage urban minority ...

OBJECTIVE: To help preserve continuity of health insurance coverage during the recent recession, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided a 65 percent Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) premium subsidy for workers laid off in 2008-2010. We examined COBRA enrollment levels with the subsidy and the health, access, and ...

KALÓ Z., LANDA K., DOLEŽAL T. & VOKÓ Z. (2012) European Journal of Cancer Care Transferability of National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence recommendations for pharmaceutical therapies in oncology to Central-Eastern European countries The health burden of malignancies is greater in Central-Eastern Europe than in Western Europe. Furthermore, these ...

Men who have sex with men (MSM) appear to experience barriers to health care compared with general population men. This report examines individual differences in health care access within a diverse sample of urban MSM (N = 871). The authors examined demographic differences in health care access and the relation ...

To the Editor: In their Perspective article on generic atorvastatin and health care costs, Jackevicius et al. (Jan. 19 issue)(1) refer to agreements that we at Pfizer have reached with health plans and pharmacy benefit managers to ensure that patients can continue to have access to Lipitor in the 180-day ...

The election of a centre-right government in 2008 has spawned a series of ongoing reforms to the structures for governing New Zealand's health system. These mainly involve creation of a series of new national agencies designed to stimulate national coordination and centralization of some planning and service delivery functions along ...

Although the population of homeschooled children in the United States is large and growing, little is known about their access to and utilization of preventive health care services. This paper compares the health care access and utilization of homeschooled children and public school children in the United States using data ...

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Sub-Saharan African populations are growing in many European countries. Data on the health of these populations are rare. Additionally, many sub-Saharan African migrants are confronted with issues of low socio-economic status, acculturation and language difficulties, which may hamper their access to health care. Despite the identification of some ...

The trend away from a health and medical care-based policy to a healthy public policy has taken place in Sweden rather later than in other West European countries. One of the first county councils to establish health-promotion plans was Västernorrland. The aims of this study are to describe the contents ...

The availability of, and access to, primary health care is one neighbourhood characteristic that has the potential to impact health thus representing an important area of focus for neighbourhood-health research. This research examines neighbourhood access to primary health care in the city of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. A modification of the ...

While there is a growing literature on building performance measurement systems for health equities, this literature for the most part has not dealt with the challenges of coordinating the various parts of the system, the heterogeneous nature of such systems, or how evaluations and measurement can themselves improve performance. This ...

ABSTRACT: INTRODUCTION: In recent years, the country of Mongolia (population 2.8 million) has experienced rapid social changes associated with economic growth, persisting socio-economic inequities and internal migration. In order to improve health access for the urban poor, the Ministry of Health developed a "Reaching Every District" strategy (RED strategy) to ...

I argue for a conception of health as a person's ability to achieve or exercise a cluster of basic human activities. These basic activities are in turn specified through free-standing ethical reasoning about what constitutes a minimal conception of a human life with equal human dignity in the modern world. ...

Abstract Increasing sex workers' (SWs) access to and utilisation of health care services is a key part of HIV prevention. An HIV prevention project in Mysore, India, has been particularly successful in fostering a new norm of health care seeking among local SWs while facilitating community ownership of health care ...

This paper presents an overview of some core methodological issues in improving the evaluation of health equity interventions. It argues that evaluation can play a central role in the solution space if it takes a futures orientation and develops adaptive approaches. It makes the case that purpose must drive method ...

Tradeoffs between health and wealth are among the most important decisions individuals make, and are central to social and economic policy. Yet, only a few studies have investigated the utility of health and wealth empirically. This paper investigates this utility function both theoretically and empirically. We conduct detailed personal interviews ...

In the past decade, the Government of China initiated health-care reforms to achieve universal access to health care by 2020. We assessed trends in health-care access and financial protection between 2003, and 2011, nationwide. We used data from the 2003, 2008, and 2011 National Health Services Survey (NHSS), which used ...

New Zealand (NZ) has a central government-driven, tax-funded health system with the state as dominant payer. The NZ experience precedes and endorses the US concept of patient-centered medical homes providing population-based, nonepisodic care supported by network organizations. These networks provide administration, budget holding, incentivized programs, data feedback, peer review, education, ...

Evidence suggests that older adults with extensive tooth loss may present dietetic restrictions and frequently choose softer and more processed foods, which consequently may lead to obesity. To evaluate whether there was an association between dental status and central obesity in community-dwelling elderly. A simple random sample of 471 community-dwelling ...

OBJECTIVE: To estimate the impact of deductibles on the initiation and continuation of psychotherapy for depression. DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING: Data from health care encounters and claims from Group Health Cooperative, a large integrated health care system in Washington State, was merged with information from a centralized behavioral health triage call ...

Health inequity and improper dispensing of social justice is a huge topic of which one aspect is healthcare information and access to it. Access to health information is a 'prerequisite for meeting the Millennium Development Goals', and lack of knowledge and information, especially in resource-poor settings, impedes the delivery of ...

In this study, the effects on the claw health of dairy cows of three different floor types and access to pasture were investigated on 35 farms. The farms were fitted with a given floor type in the indoor walking area of a cubicle housing system: a solid rubber, mastic asphalt ...

Abstract. The agents of human febrile illness can vary by region and country suggesting that diagnosis, treatment, and control programs need to be based on a methodical evaluation of area-specific etiologies. From December 2006 to December 2009, 9,997 individuals presenting with acute febrile illness at nine health care clinics in ...

Objectives: In Central American countries, the economic burden of tobacco has not been assessed. In Costa Rica, a study demonstrated that tobacco-related diseases represent high costs for the health care system. The aim of this study was to assess the cost-effectiveness of varenicline compared with other existing strategies for smoking ...

Developing better health systems is the key to delivering optimal health services, although more evidence of effective strategies to do so is needed. Field surveys were conducted in Viet Nam and Cambodia to identify best practices in addressing health system bottlenecks to scale up disease control programs. The two countries ...

Denmark has a tradition of a decentralized health system. However, during recent years, reforms and policy initiatives have gradually centralized the health system in different ways. The structural reform of 2007 merged the old counties into fewer bigger regions, and the old municipalities likewise. The hospital structure is undergoing similar ...

School-based health centers (SBHCs) have become an important method of health care delivery for the youth of our nation. Although they only represent 1 aspect of a coordinated school health program approach, SBHCs have provided access to health care services for youth confronted with age, financial, cultural, and geographic barriers. ...

Nationally, disparity exists in the delivery of mental health services to minority groups, and an imperative exists that expects culturally responsive care. The purpose of this grounded theory study was to discover health-seeking practices used by Native American Indians (NAIs) with persistent mental illness (PMI). Eighteen interviews were examined using ...

PURPOSE.  The purpose of this paper is to provide a concept analysis of critical access health care. A common understanding of critical access health care would benefit those who legislate, provide, and consume health care. METHODS.  A review of the literature was conducted using an identical set of search terms ...

A "disability certificate" is necessary to access benefits afforded under the Persons with Disabilities Act (1995) in India. This paper analyses this requirement and concludes that it constitutes a major challenge to maintaining privacy of health information especially for persons with mental health disabilities in India and recommends modifications in ...

The world class commissioning (WCC) programme was introduced in the English NHS in 2007 to develop primary care trust (PCT) commissioning of health services. There has been limited evaluation of health commissioning initiatives over the years and in particular little is known about how commissioners interpret and implement initiatives and ...

Theories and traditions emphasizing the centrality of caring have guided the evolution of the healthcare professions. In contemporary practice, creating a therapeutic context in which healing can occur relies not just on the caring dispositions of individual clinicians, but also on the collective relational capacities of interprofessional healthcare teams. This ...

Geographers play important roles in public health research, particularly in understanding healthcare accessibility, utilisation, and individual healthcare experiences. Most accessibility studies have benefited from the increased sophistication of geographic information systems (GIS). Some studies have been enhanced with semi-structured in-depth interviews to understand individual experiences of people as they access ...

Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) are well recognized beneficial host-associated members of the microbiota of humans and animals. Yet LAB-associations of invertebrates have been poorly characterized and their functions remain obscure. Here we show that honeybees possess an abundant, diverse and ancient LAB microbiota in their honey crop with beneficial effects ...

While U.S. health care reform will most likely reduce the overall number of uninsured Mexican-Americans, it does not address challenges related to health care coverage for undocumented Mexican immigrants, who will remain uninsured under the measures of the reform; documented low-income Mexican immigrants who have not met the five-year waiting ...

Central Appalachia residents present unique healthcare challenges. This vulnerable population faces poor health status and low access to health care. 'The Health Wagon' was established to innovatively enhance access to health care for the poor and marginalized rural population of Central Appalachia. This article describes the operations of the Health ...

Health access behaviours of doctors need to be understood if the profession is to adequately respond to concerns raised about doctors' health. There has been limited investigation of these issues and most qualitative studies have focussed on doctors who have been seriously unwell. This research project was designed to explore ...

The emergence of information technology in healthcare holds the promise to transform the industry through the creation of highly reliable information exchange. These same technologies have a central role in the patient safety movement. Organizations that wish to deliver safe and high-quality healthcare will only be successful if they plan, ...

Background:  The relationship between health information seeking, patient engagement and health literacy is not well understood. This is especially true in medically underserved populations, which are often viewed as having limited access to health information. Objective:  To improve communication between an urban health centre and the community it serves, a ...

Low rates of breast and cervical cancer screening among Hmong women have been documented. Mistrust of Western medicine and the health care system, as well as experiences of discrimination in health care, may be barriers to seeking health care for this population. In this study, we explored medical mistrust among ...

OBJECTIVE: This study's objective was to quantify the impact (utility) of common complications of early cervical cancer treatment on quality of life (QOL). Utilities assigned by survivors were compared to those assigned by providers. METHODS: 30 survivors of early cervical cancer identified from our Tumor Registry and 10 gynecologic oncology ...