Medical care
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Recent efforts to recruit blood and organ donors have only marginally improved demographic disparities in willingness to donate. Few studies have examined which factors are most important in explaining race and gender disparities in willingness to donate. ⋯ Both race and gender are important identifiers of those less willing to donate. To maximize efficiency, donor recruitment efforts should focus on race-gender groups with lowest levels of willingness. Potential donor concerns regarding mistrust in hospitals and religion/spirituality may serve as important issues to address when developing programs to improve donation rates.
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The Health Utilities Index Mark 3 (HUI3) is a generic multiattribute preference-based measure of health status and health-related quality of life that is widely used as an outcome measure in clinical studies, in population health surveys, in the estimation of quality-adjusted life years, and in economic evaluations. HUI3 consists of eight attributes (or dimensions) of health status: vision, hearing, speech, ambulation, dexterity, emotion, cognition, and pain with 5 or 6 levels per attribute, varying from highly impaired to normal. ⋯ The HUI3 scoring function has strong theoretical and empirical foundations. It performs well in predicting directly measured scores. The HUI3 system provides a practical way to obtain utility scores based on community preferences.