Family practice
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Observational Study
Continuity of care for patients with chronic disease: a registry-based observational study from Norway.
Continuity of care (CoC) is accepted as a core value of primary care and is especially appreciated by patients with chronic conditions. Nevertheless, there are few studies investigating CoC for these patients across levels of healthcare. ⋯ Our findings suggest that CoC in Norwegian healthcare system is achieved for a majority of patients with chronic diseases. Patients with heart failure had the highest continuity with their RGP. Higher CoC was associated with older age and living in urban areas.
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Lung ultrasound (LUS) has become the first diagnostic imaging approach to assess lung involvement in COVID-19. While LUS proved to be safe, reliable, and accurate, not many primary care physicians (PCP) are capable to employ this instrument in the first evaluation of COVID-19 outpatients. The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of a brief training program in LUS for PCP. ⋯ This study showed that a short training program, but comprising a hands-on practice, is capable to bring even almost novices to achieve a high overall accuracy and reliability in detecting lung involvement in COVID-19. This may result in a significant improvement of the performances of PCP involved in the first evaluation of COVID-19 cases in primary care facilities.
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In order to integrate genomic medicine into routine patient care and stratify personal risk, it is increasingly important to record family history (FH) information in general/family practice records. This is true for classic genetic disease as well as multifactorial conditions. Research suggests that FH recording is currently inadequate. ⋯ FH information in general/family practice records should be better prepared for the genomic era. Whilst some conditions are well recorded, there is a need for more frequent, higher quality recording with greater accuracy, especially for multifactorial conditions.
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The prevalence of vitamin D deficiency varies across countries and few data exist in the adult population in Greece. ⋯ A large proportion of patients in primary care had vitamin D deficiency, independently associated with hypertension, sleepiness, depressive symptoms, and fatigue. Further research is needed in order to determine the role of vitamin D in these patients.
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Evidence has suggested a relationship between antenatal care (ANC) visits and childhood immunization coverage. However, evaluating its impact using observational data suffers from the problem of selection bias. Hence, we adopted propensity score-matched (PSM) analysis for studying the impact of ANC visits on childhood immunization. ⋯ Findings from our study imply that policymakers in India should focus on further improving the ANC coverage as it has a significant impact on improving childhood immunization coverage.