Health & place
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This study analyses the processes through which the physical environment of health care settings impacts on patients' well-being. Specifically, we investigate the mediating role of perceptions of the physical and social environments, and if this process is moderated by patients' status, that is, if the objective physical environment impacts inpatients' and outpatients' satisfaction by different social-psychological processes. ⋯ For inpatients, it is the perception of quality of the social environment that mediates the relationship between objective environmental quality and satisfaction, whereas for outpatients it is the perception of quality of the physical environment. This moderated mediation is discussed in terms of differences on patients' experiences of health care environments.
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This study examines the influence of cancer stage, distance to treatment facilities and area disadvantage on breast and colorectal cancer spatial survival inequalities. We also estimate the number of premature deaths after adjusting for cancer stage to quantify the impact of spatial survival inequalities. Population-based descriptive study of residents aged <90 years in Queensland, Australia diagnosed with primary invasive breast (25,202 females) or colorectal (14,690 males, 11,700 females) cancers during 1996-2007. ⋯ Of the 6,019 colorectal cancer deaths within 5 years of diagnosis, 470 (8%) were associated with spatial inequalities in non-diagnostic factors, i.e. factors beyond cancer stage at diagnosis. For breast cancers, of 2,412 deaths, 170 (7%) were related to spatial inequalities in non-diagnostic factors. Quantifying premature deaths can increase incentive for action to reduce these spatial inequalities.
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Responses to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, and criticisms of those responses, were framed by issues endemic to the meeting of 'health' and 'security' as governing domains. Offering an editorial introduction to the selection of papers in this special issue, it is suggested that existing scholarship in the emerging field of 'health security' can be categorized according to realist-advocacy, historical-analytic, problematization and critical-inequality approaches. In contributing to this literature through an event-based focus on the pandemic, the papers embrace the opportunity to examine health security architectures acting and interacting 'in the event', to not only speculate over the possible implications of this governing trope, but to review them. Questions of the scales of governance and associated forms of expertise, the implications of differing modes of governance (from preparedness to surveillance to forms of intervention), and the role of health inequalities in the patterning of the pandemic are identified as key themes running across the papers.
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Although the term biosurveillance is employed with increasing frequency there remain variances in way in which the concept is both understood and practiced in the US and the UK, respectively. In this paper I begin by exploring the different epistemological and geographical approaches to biosurveillance that are employed in each locality, paying particular attention to the scales at which they, respectively, operate. ⋯ I contend in this paper, and illustrate through a study of the techniques of surveillance employed during the recent H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic, that these different 'registers' of biosurveillance are now being bought into the same frame of reference to create new, ever more robust and finely calibrated systems of biological surveillance. In thinking through the political implications of the emergent collision, I outline here, employing work from Cooper, Katz, and Lyon how biosurveillance is becoming progressively domesticated and reflect on the potential this has for creating new, expansive, and very pervasive, forms of biological 'governmentality'.
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We seek to map and describe variation in geographic access to the set of 189 specialist adult inpatient hospices in England and Wales. Using almost 35,000 small Census areas (Local Super Output Areas: LSOAs) as our units of analysis, the locations of hospices, and estimated drive times from LSOAs to hospices we construct an accessibility 'score' for each LSOA, for England and Wales as a whole. ⋯ That subset is then filtered according to the deprivation score for each LSOA, in order to identify those LSOAs which are also above average in terms of deprivation. While urban areas are relatively well served, large parts of England and Wales have poor access to hospices, and there is a risk that the needs of those living in relatively deprived areas may be unmet.