Family practice
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Observational Study
Depression and family arguments: disentangling reciprocal effects for women and men.
Depression is a debilitating condition that affects the individual and the family. ⋯ These findings suggest that while depressive symptoms may temporarily diminish family arguments among women, such symptoms were associated with more family arguments over longer time intervals. Moreover, family arguments put depressed men and women at risk for more severe depressive symptoms. These results support the use of screening for family arguments and interventions to help depressed individuals develop skills to manage interpersonal conflict.
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Observational Study
Communication between primary and secondary care: deficits and danger.
Timely and accurate communication between primary and secondary care is essential for delivering high-quality patient care. ⋯ Future research should be aimed at developing robust strategies to addressing communication gaps reported in this study.
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Multicenter Study Observational Study
Validation of self-reported help-seeking, and measurement of the patient interval, for cancer symptoms: an observational study to inform methodological challenges in symptomatic presentation research.
To improve earlier presentation with potential symptoms of cancer, accurate data are needed on how people respond to these symptoms. It is currently unclear how self-reported medical help-seeking for symptoms associated with cancer by people from the community correspond to what is recorded in their general practice records, or how well the patient interval (time from symptom onset to first presentation to a health-professional) can be estimated from patient records. ⋯ Patient self-report of help-seeking for symptoms potentially associated with cancer offer a reasonably accurate method to research responses to these symptoms. Incomplete patient interval data suggest routine general practice records are unreliable for measuring this important part of the patient's symptom journey.
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General practice is the centre of care for patients with medically unexplained symptoms (MUS). Providing explanations for MUS, i.e. making sense of symptoms, is considered to be an important part of care for MUS patients. However, little is known how general practitioners (GPs) do this in daily practice. ⋯ Although explanations for MUS are provided in most MUS consultations, there seems room for improving the explanations given in these consultations. Further studies on the effectiveness of explanations and on the interaction between patients and GP in constructing these explanations are required in order to make MUS explanations more suitable in daily primary care practice.