Medical care
-
Inequalities in access to palliative care programs (PCP) by age have been shown to exist in Canada and elsewhere. Few studies have been able to provide greater insight by simultaneously adjusting for multiple demographic, health service, and socio-cultural indicators. ⋯ Age continues to be a significant predictor of PCP registration in Nova Scotia even after controlling for the confounding effects of many new demographic, health service, and ecologic indicators.
-
Physician and patient gender both influence medical communication. Nonverbal behavior is generally under-researched in the medical encounter but plays an important role for patient outcomes such as satisfaction. ⋯ To be satisfied, patients expect female and male physicians to show different patterns of nonverbal behavior. Awareness of these gender-specific expectations should be taken into account in medical training.
-
To study trends in reporting rates of euthanasia from 1990 to 2005 in relation to whether recommended or nonrecommended drugs were used, and the most important differences between reported and unreported cases in 2005. ⋯ Euthanasia with nonrecommended drugs is almost never reported. The total reporting rate increased because of an increase in the use of recommended drugs for euthanasia between 1995 and 2001, and an increase in the reporting rate for euthanasia with recommended drugs between 2001 and 2005.
-
Gaps in Medicaid coverage can result in inadequate access to care. This can be particularly detrimental to those with a chronic disease such as diabetes. ⋯ The results from this study suggest that interruptions in Medicaid coverage are associated with overall greater program expenditures in the post-lapse periods. However, this increase in expenditures seems to be driven by a subset of individuals whose greater use of inpatient and emergency room services increased overall program costs.
-
To describe Medicare beneficiaries' transitions through home health care within the context of other acute and post-acute services, and to examine agreement between administrative claims and Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) measures of health services use. ⋯ Findings reinforce the potential merit of patient-specific rather than setting-specific measures of quality, but underscore practical challenges to constructing measures that span data sources and episodes of care.