Medical care
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Comparative Study
Methodological problems in comparing English-speaking and Spanish-speaking patients' satisfaction with interpersonal aspects of care.
The authors examine the reliability and validity of English and Spanish versions of a patient satisfaction measure, the Interpersonal Aspects of Care (IAC) Examiner Scale. ⋯ The results bring into question the use of certain types of response formats and the practice of dichotomizing responses when evaluating patient satisfaction in Spanish-speaking patients.
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The objectives of this study were to identify quality-of-life concerns, as reported by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) seropositive individuals, and to develop a measure to assess these concerns. ⋯ Five dimensions of the new HIV/AIDS-targeted quality of life instrument (overall function, disclosure worries, health worries, financial worries, and life satisfaction) exhibited good psychometric properties, including low ceiling/floor effects, good internal consistency, and evidence for construct validity.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study Clinical Trial
Conducting physician mail surveys on a limited budget. A randomized trial comparing $2 bill versus $5 bill incentives.
The effects of incentive size on physicians' response rates to a mail survey were determined. ⋯ A $5 bill incentive yielded a higher response rate among the physicians in this study than did a $2 bill incentive. Moreover, the powerful effect of the incentive size, combined with the consequent decline in the costs of subsequent mailing waves, suggests that resources in a fixed survey budget are allocated more efficiently to increasing the initial incentive rather than to providing a third wave to nonresponders.
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Symptom management is increasingly recognized as a critical element of patient care, particularly in managing chronic illness. However, research on outcomes related to symptom management is in its infancy, except for the symptom of pain. This symptom was therefore chosen as a prototype to review the state of the science regarding relations between organizational variables and symptom management outcomes and to illustrate the issues regardless of the symptom managed. This article discusses pain outcome measures appropriate for acute and cancer pain, proposes attributes of the care delivery system that may affect outcome measures, and identifies challenges associated with this type of research. ⋯ Although the answer to this question is unknown, a few research studies suggest that organizational context is likely to influence pain outcomes. It is clear, however, from ongoing work that until several conceptual, methodological, and analytic challenges are resolved, research is unlikely to capture the influence of variations in care delivery systems on symptom management outcomes.