Blogs

Heavily sponsored by Cautious Patient, the Patient Participation Conference will offer:

• An unconference: content generated as much by attendees as conference organizers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference
• Low cost: preferably under $200 for the average attendee, we want real patients and caregivers to be able to attend out-of-pocket. That means we also need to low-glitz; you might get a t-shirt as a handout, but no ipod.
  

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Even with insurance, 1 in 6 have unmet health-care needs

TORONTO, Ont., July 20, 2010--Most studies of healthcare for homeless people have been conducted in the United States, where it's not surprising that lack of money and insurance are the main barriers.

But what about here in Canada, where we have publicly funded universal health care?

A new study finds that 17 per cent of homeless people in Toronto - one in six - reported unmet health care needs. Women with dependent children had almost twice as much trouble getting access to healthcare as the general population of the city.

ScienceDaily (July 19, 2010) — Patients often receive inappropriate care when their doctors fail to take into account their individual circumstances, according to a new study by the University of Illinois at Chicago and the VA Center for Management of Complex Chronic Care.

The study of physician performance is the largest ever to be conducted using actors presenting as patients in doctors' offices. It appears in the July 20 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine and was funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

[img_assist|nid=229|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=640|height=258]Physicians who provided Guided Care, a primary care enhancement program for patients with multiple chronic conditions, reported higher levels of satisfaction with their patient/family communications and their knowledge of their patients’ clinical characteristics, according to a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Family doctors feel unready to order mental health services, polls find

Mental health campaigners fear that a "postcode lottery writ large" will leave vulnerable people without care as doctors indicate they do not want to take on responsibility for services for the mentally ill.

The government's health white paper last week proposed a massive shake-up of NHS mental health services, stripping primary care trusts of the power to commission services and handing the budgets to GPs.

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Information security and privacy in the healthcare sector is an issue of growing importance but much remains to be done to address the various issues raised by healthcare consumers regarding privacy and security and the providers' perspective of regulatory compliance.

Canada needs a national approach to funding drugs for rare diseases and can learn from other countries, states an analysis article in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

Due to relatively small markets, pharmaceutical companies may be reluctant to conduct research into new treatments or to manufacture drugs, and there is a constant risk that they may stop making these drugs. A partnership is needed between the federal government, pharmaceutical companies and the medical communities to ensure people with rare diseases can get treatment.

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More than one-third of U.S. physicians responding to a survey did not agree that physicians should always report colleagues who are incompetent or impaired by conditions such as substance abuse or mental health disorders. The report from the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), published in the July 14 Journal of the American Medical Association, also finds that substantial numbers of physicians feel unprepared to report or otherwise deal with impaired or incompetent colleagues.