Journal of general internal medicine
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Optimal ages of breast cancer screening cessation remain uncertain. ⋯ If all women receive idealized treatment, the benefits of mammography beyond age 79 are too low relative to their costs to justify continued screening. However, if treatment is not ideal, extending screening beyond age 79 could be considered, especially for women in the top 25% of life expectancy for their age.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Evaluation of a women's safe shelter experience to teach internal medicine residents about intimate partner violence. A randomized controlled trial.
Although intimate partner violence (IPV) remains a major public health problem, physicians often fail to screen female patients. Reported IPV training approaches suffer from weak study designs and limited outcome assessments. We hypothesized that an educational experience for residents at a women's safe shelter would have significantly greater impact on IPV competencies, screening, and care for victims than a workshop seminar alone. ⋯ There were no significant differences between cases and controls in the subscales of skills, attitudes, or resource awareness. Cases increased their self-reported screening frequency but this did not differ significantly from the controls. Enhancing traditional IPV curriculum with a women's safe shelter educational experience may result in small improvements in residents' knowledge about IPV.
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In an era of rising health care costs, many Americans experience difficulty paying for needed health care services. With costs expected to continue rising, changes to private insurance plans and public programs aimed at containing costs may have a negative impact on Americans' ability to afford care. ⋯ Privately and publicly insured individuals who have low incomes or functional impairments encounter significant financial barriers to care despite having health insurance. Proposals to expand health insurance will need to address these barriers in order to be effective.
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To examine how primary care physicians respond to ambiguous patient symptom presentations. ⋯ Primary care physicians respond to ambiguity by either ignoring the ambiguity and becoming more directive (UC) or, less often, by acknowledging the ambiguity and attempting to explore symptoms and patient concerns in more detail (HP). Future areas of study could address whether physicians can learn HP behaviors and whether HP behaviors positively affect health outcomes.
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To compare the utilization of health care resources and patterns of chronic disease care by patients of medical residents and patients of their attending physicians. ⋯ Our results indicate that residents' patients had higher costs than attendings' patients, but the differences would have been seriously overestimated without adjustment. We conclude that it costs about 7% more for residents to manage patients than for attendings. On the ambulatory side, the larger number of procedures and consults ordered for residents' patients appears to drive the higher costs.