Family practice
-
The Partnership Overweight Netherlands (PON) is a collaboration between 18 partners, which are national organizations of health care providers, health insurance companies and patient organizations. The PON published an integrated health care standard for obesity in November 2010. The integrated health care standard for obesity involves strategies for diagnosis and early detection of high-risk individuals as well as appropriate combined lifestyle interventions for those who are overweight and obese and, when appropriate, additional medical therapies. The PON works towards a standard that transcends traditional boundaries of conventional health care systems and health care professions but, instead, focuses on competences of groups of health professionals who organize care from a patient-oriented perspective.
-
To assess the results achieved with a rapid referral pathway for suspected colorectal cancer (CRC), comparing with the standard referral pathway. ⋯ The rapid referral pathway reduced waiting time to colonoscopy and overall waiting time to final treatment and appears to be an effective strategy for diagnosing CRC in its early stages.
-
Type 2 diabetes imposes a large and growing burden on the public's health. This burden, combined with the growing evidence for primary prevention from randomized controlled trials of structured lifestyle programs leads to recommendations to include caloric reduction, increased physical activity and specific assistance to patients in problem solving to achieve modest weight loss as well as pharmacotherapy. These recommendations demand exploration of new ways to implement such primary prevention strategies through more integrated community organization, medical practice and policy. ⋯ This paper presents possible actions proposed by an expert panel, summarized in Table 1 as recommendations for immediate action, strategic action and research. The collaboration of primary care and public health systems will be required to make many of these recommendations a reality. This paper also provides information on the progress made in recent years by the Division of Diabetes Translation at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to implement or facilitate such integration of primary care and public health for primary prevention.
-
Chronic musculoskeletal pain (CMP) is treated in primary care by a wide range of health professionals including chiropractors, osteopaths and physiotherapists. ⋯ Seeking care for any condition is not static but a process particularly for long-term conditions such as CMP. This may need to be taken into account by both CMP patients and their treating health professionals, in that both should not assume that their views about causation and treatment are static and that instead they should be revisited on a regular basis. Adopting a shared decision-making approach to treatment may be useful particularly for long-term conditions; however, in some cases, this may be easier said than done due to both patients' and health professionals' sometimes discomfort with adopting such an approach. Training and support for both health professionals and patients may be helpful in facilitating a shared decision-making approach.
-
The IMPaCT Back study (IMplementation to improve Patient Care through Targeted treatment for Back pain) is a quality improvement study which aims to investigate the effects of introducing and supporting a subgrouping for targeted treatment system for patients with low back pain (LBP) in primary care. This paper details the subgrouping for targeted treatment system and the clinical training and mentoring programmes aimed at equipping clinicians to deliver it. THE SUBGROUPING AND TARGETED TREATMENT SYSTEM: This system differs from 'one-size fits all' usual practice as it suggests that first contact health care practitioners should systematically allocate LBP patients to one of the three subgroups according to key modifiable prognostic indicators for chronicity. Patients in each subgroup (those at low, medium or high risk of chronicity) are then managed according to a targeted treatment system of increasing complexity. THE SUBGROUPING TOOLS: Subgrouping tools help guide clinical decision-making about treatment and onward referral. Two subgrouping tools have been used in the IMPaCT Back study, a 9-item version used by participating physiotherapists and a 6-item version used by GPs. The targeted treatments. The targeted treatments include a minimal intervention delivered by GPs (for those patients at low risk of poor outcome) or referral to primary care physiotherapists who can apply physiotherapy approaches to addressing pain and disability (for those at medium risk) and additional cognitive-behavioural approaches to help address psychological and social obstacles to recovery (for those at high risk). THE TRAINING PACKAGES: Building on previous interventions for other pilot studies and randomized trials, we have developed and delivered clinical training and support programmes for GPs and physiotherapists. ⋯ ISRCTN55174281.