Background:Although overweight and obesity are less prevalent among active-duty military personnel compared with similar persons not serving in the military, no such differences have been observed between veterans and non-veterans.Objectives:To assess the magnitude of weight changes before, concurrent with and following discharge from the military, relative to weight during service, ...

Whereas physical sport activity is generally considered a health benefit, extreme exercise may be harmful. Of particular concern in this regard is the considerable variation between doctors in the primary care setting and those working within the sports setting around the diagnosis and treatment of athletes presenting with similar symptoms. ...

This paper examines the multiple influences Scottish psychiatrists have exercised over the shape of English responses to mental illness during nearly three centuries, beginning with George Cheyne and ending with R.D. Laing. Scotland's distinctive response to mental illness was largely ignored until recently, as though it had simply followed the ...

Objective To determine the prevalence of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use over time in a population-based cohort of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Methods The Manitoba IBD Cohort Study is a longitudinal, population-based study of multiple determinants of health outcomes in an IBD cohort. Participants completed semi-annual surveys, ...

To assess the evidence of the use and efficacy for complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). A systematic literature search in MEDLINE was performed for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. Moreover, a selective literature search for health services research studies on ...

Review by an administrative law judge (ALJ) constitutes the third level of appeal for healthcare providers seeking to overturn reverse recovery audit contractor (RAC) findings of overpayment of Medicare claims. An analysis of the results of RAC appeals submitted by 30 New York hospitals during the demonstration project has disclosed ...

Legal sanctions alone are often ineffective in preventing stalking because, in the absence of treatment, the fundamental problems driving the stalker remain unresolved. Criminal justice interventions can be problematic because of difficulties in framing anti-stalking legislation and inconsistencies in their application. Civil remedies in the form of restraining orders may ...

INTRODUCTION: There is limited guidance regarding effective preventions for post-disaster mental health problems and what kind of support is preferred by disaster survivors. AIM: To describe the use of and satisfaction with support in three Scandinavian countries after the tsunami and analyzing the association between support and posttraumatic stress reactions. ...

There is a growing consensus that mental health is not merely the absence of mental illness, but it also includes the presence of positive feelings (emotional well-being) and positive functioning in individual life (psychological well-being) and community life (social well-being). We examined the structure, reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity ...

This article reports on the results of a needs assessment conducted for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) immigrants, asylees, refugees, and their allies in Southern Arizona, and it is the first study of its kind in the United States. Utilizing interview data collected with migrants, allies, and service ...

As the volume of medical literature increases exponentially, maintaining current clinical practice is becoming more difficult. Multiple, Internet-based journal clubs and alert services have recently emerged. The purpose of this study is to determine whether the use of the e-mail alert service, Nephrology Now, increases knowledge translation regarding current nephrology ...

The Mental Vulnerability Questionnaire was originally a 22 item scale, later reduced to a 12 item scale. In population studies the 12 item scale has been a significant predictor of health and illness. The scale has not been psychometrically evaluated for more than 30 years, and the aim of the ...

Hope is an important aspect of mental health recovery and a major concern in patients with mental illness. Therefore, an instrument to measure hope could be useful for clinical settings and research. The aim of this study was to develop a Dutch version of the Herth Hope Index (HHI-Dutch) and ...

A validated questionnaire regarding patient satisfaction with psychological services is reported. There is a German and an Italian version, with a total sample size of 655 persons. Based on satisfaction criteria generated by the patients themselves, a preliminary version and consecutively the final version, computed according to psychometric criteria, were ...

The validity of the Cognitive Performance Scale (CPS) embedded in the Resident Assessment Instrument-Mental Health (RAI-MH) was evaluated among adult psychiatric inpatients. The CPS is a brief measure of cognitive performance, with scores ranging from 0 (intact) to 6 (very severe impairment). The CPS scores were compared with the Mini-Mental ...

Although the nation's local health departments (LHDs) share a common mission, variability in administrative structures is a barrier to identifying common, optimal management strategies. There is a gap in understanding what unifying features LHDs share as organizations that could be leveraged systematically for achieving high performance. To explore sources of ...

To assess the acceptability and face validity of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) in Aboriginal community controlled health services (ACCHOs) located in the greater Sydney region. A qualitative study was conducted in three ACCHOs located within the greater Sydney region in 2008-2009. A semi-structured approach was used in focus ...

The aim of this study was to systematically examine the impact of shame, guilt, and dissociation on interpersonal relationships. Study 1 assessed 81 participants attending a trauma-related treatment service with the Structured Interview for Disorders of Extreme Stress and the Community and Interpersonal Connectedness Scale. Study 2 assessed 21 traumatized ...

Mental health research among Latino farmworkers is hampered by the absence of measurement evaluation that ensures farmworkers understand and can consistently and appropriately respond to questions about mental health. Cross-sectional data were obtained from 409 farmworkers via interviewer-administered survey questionnaires. Mental health was operationalized with the short-form Center for Epidemiologic ...

Cognitive overload has been recognized as a significant cause of error in industries such as aviation and measuring mental workload has become a key method of improving safety. The aim of this study was to pilot the use of a new method of measuring mental workload in the operating theatre ...

: The Camberwell Assessment of Need (CAN) is a widely used instrument to assess the service needs for people with a severe mental illness. No reliability data are available for its use in South Africa. : Interrater and test-retest reliability were documented for a sub-sample of 194 patients participating in ...

Mental health organizations that have successfully reduced or, in some cases, eliminated use of seclusion and restraint report that they have primarily focused on organizational factors to facilitate this process. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of an instrument that measures staff perceptions of organizational activities ...

Empowerment is a key aspect of recovery and a common term in the mental health field, but there are few consistent definitions or validated measures of the construct. This study conducted psychometric testing on the Empowerment Scale, a widely used measure in the field. As part of the Consumer-Operated Multi-Site ...

Musculoskeletal injuries are the most common source of chronic pain and disability. The ankle joint is the most common of these injuries and without adequate rehabilitation function can be severely impaired. Access to physiotherapy rehabilitation services can be limited due to geographical remoteness and a shortage of services in rural ...

To investigate the relationship between those issues concerning quality of life in patients with neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2) as identified by the closed set NF2 questionnaire and the eight norm-based measures and the physical component summary (PCS) and mental component summary (MCS) scores of the Short Form-36 (SF-36) Questionnaire. Postal ...

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of discrimination and familismo on internalizing mental health symptoms among two generations of Latinos, youth and their parents, residing in the Southwest region of the United States. Data from the Latino Acculturation and Health Project was used to determine the ...

Research on internalized homophobia (IH) has linked it to both mental and physical health outcomes. Extant research indicates that IH and mental health are related in a variety of different subgroups of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) persons. However, much of this research has suffered from methodological issues. Studies have ...

Measuring carers' perceived satisfaction with services is crucial if services are going to continually improve their responsiveness to the needs of those they serve. The aim of this study was to assess the reliability of the next generation FAMCARE tool, which was adapted to reflect inpatient and team-based care using ...

High prevalence rates of psychological problems among juvenile offenders underscore the need for effective mental health screening tools in the juvenile justice system. In this study, we evaluated the validity of the Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument-2 (MAYSI-2) developed by Grisso and Barnum (2001) to identify mental health needs of adolescents ...

The aim of this study is to examine the possible changes in depressive symptoms related to various adverse experiences, based on a three-year follow-up among adolescents. All 10(th) graders invited to enter the youth section of the Oslo Health Study 2001 (n = 3,811) constituted a baseline of a longitudinal ...

Needs assessment is a valuable approach for determining the way health and social services allocate resources to people with cancer and their caregivers. To assess the reliability, validity and acceptability of a Needs Assessment Tool (NAT) in a palliative care clinical setting. Psychometric properties of the NAT were initially explored ...

Previous attitudinal research has found that the way survey questions are asked can influence respondents' answers regarding their support for sensitive issues. This study aimed to explore whether findings regarding community support for harm reduction services could be manipulated through priming of language and information contained within survey items. A ...

Stigma has been conceptualized as comprised of 3 constructs: knowledge (ignorance), attitudes (prejudice), and behaviour (discrimination). We are not aware of a psychometrically tested instrument to assess knowledge about mental health problems among the general public. Our paper presents the results of the development stage and the psychometric properties of ...

International reports have shown that the majority of patients with a psychiatric disorder are most often seen in non-psychiatric services and are not effectively diagnosed. The objectives of this study, conducted in Argentina and Venezuela, was to validate the Personal Health Scale (PHS), a 10-item instrument developed for the detection ...

Adverse experiences with child immunisation services can contribute to the deferral of immunisation appointments and to non-attendance. The aim of this study was to design and validate the Satisfaction With Immunisation Service Questionnaire (SWISQ) as a tool that can be used by general practices to evaluate their service and identify ...

Objective  Most mental health outcome and satisfaction measures have been developed by academic researchers or service providers. Consumers have been limited to the role of participant or advisor. The validity and reliability of these satisfaction measures have been challenged. This paper reports the development of a consumer satisfaction questionnaire in ...

The General Practitioner Experiences Questionnaire (GPEQ) measures community mental health centres from the perspective of GP but lacked accessibility scales and documentation of centre level reliability. To assess the psychometric properties of the GPEQ following the inclusion of four new accessibility items and estimate centre level reliability for all scales ...

This study aimed to validate the Perception of Change Scale - Family Version, which evaluates the perception of family caregivers in regard to the treatment outcomes of psychiatric patients in mental health services. Family caregivers (N = 300) of psychiatric patients attending mental health services completed the Perception of Change ...

Data are reported on the background and performance of the K6 screening scale for serious mental illness (SMI) in the World Health Organization (WHO) World Mental Health (WMH) surveys. The K6 is a six-item scale developed to provide a brief valid screen for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ...

Measuring community pharmacists' self-efficacy in performing medication therapy management (MTM) services can be useful for tailoring interventions and predicting participation. To identify relevant survey constructs related to the Wisconsin Pharmacy Quality Collaborative (WPQC) MTM program and to evaluate scale validity. The 31-item MTM self-efficacy scale was developed using previous research, ...

BACKGROUND: Service-user satisfaction helps determine the quality of services. No valid measure of service-user satisfaction in forensic mental health settings has been developed. AIMS: To develop and validate a scale designed to measure satisfaction with forensic mental health services. METHOD: Participants were from three forensic mental health units. Items generated ...

The reduction and, where possible, elimination of seclusion has been recognized as a national safety priority for mental health services in Australia, with significant attention devoted to strategies to achieve this goal. The aim of this study was to compare specific demographic characteristics between consumers who have been secluded to ...

The present article describes and evaluates the Youth Counseling Impact Scale (YCIS; L. Bickman et al., 2007), a recently developed therapeutic process measure that assesses youths' perceptions of the impact individual mental health counseling sessions have on their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This measure is intended for frequent use in ...

Work-related self-efficacy at a core task level fits with the social cognitive career theory explaining the career development of people with severe mental illness. The aim of this study was to further investigate the psychometric properties of the 'Work-related Self-Efficacy Scale' for use with people with psychiatric disabilities. Sixty individuals ...

The Mental Health Surveillance Study (MHSS) is an ongoing initiative by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to develop and implement methods for measuring the prevalence of serious mental illness (SMI) among adults in the USA. The 2008 MHSS used data from clinical interviews administered to a sub-sample ...

The Evidence-Based Practice Attitude Scale (EBPAS) assesses mental health and social service provider attitudes toward adopting evidence-based practices. Scores on the EBPAS derive from 4 subscales (i.e., Appeal, Requirements, Openness, and Divergence) as well as the total scale, and preliminary studies have linked EBPAS scores to clinic structure and policies, ...

The Self-Identified Stage of Recovery (SISR) is a two-part scale assessing both the stage of recovery (SISR-A) and the component processes of recovery (SISR-B) for people with mental illness. This study aimed to develop a Japanese version of the SISR and to examine its reliability and validity. The Japanese versions ...

A psychometric analysis was conducted to reduce the number of items needed to assess the disability associated with mental disorders using the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule (WHODAS). The WHODAS was to be used in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration National Survey on Drug Use and ...

In this article, we report a new image-scanning paradigm that allowed us to measure objectively individual differences in spatial mental imagery--specifically, imagery for location. Participants were asked to determine whether an arrow was pointing at a dot using a visual mental image of an array of dots. The degree of ...

The present study was conducted to assess the prevalence and associations of mental health problems (MHPs) among adolescent schoolchildren in Sri Lanka 8 months after the tsunami disaster. A descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out in the Galle Municipality area, Sri Lanka. The study instrument consisted of a self-administered questionnaire ...