Journal of general internal medicine
-
There is a growing awareness that patients should be more active and effective managers of their health and health care. Recent studies have found patient activation--or having the knowledge, skills, and confidence to manage one's health, to be related to health-related outcomes. These studies have often relied on self-reported outcomes and often have used small samples. ⋯ This cross sectional study finds that patient activation is strongly related to a broad range of health-related outcomes, which suggests improving activation has great potential. Future work should examine the effectiveness of interventions to support patient activation.
-
The aim of this update is to summarize scientifically rigorous articles published in 2010 that serve to advance the field of palliative medicine and have an impact on clinical practice. ⋯ We first identified 126 articles with potential relevance. We presented 20 at the annual SGIM update session, and discuss 11 in this paper.
-
Non-verbal communication is an important aspect of the diagnostic and therapeutic process, especially with older patients. It is unknown how non-verbal communication varies with physician and patient race. ⋯ Race plays a role in physicians' non-verbal communication with older patients. Its influence is best understood when physician race and patient race are considered jointly.
-
Routine assessments of pain using an intensity numeric rating scale (NRS) have improved documentation, but have not improved clinical outcomes. This may be, in part, due to the failure of the NRS to adequately predict patients' preferences for additional treatment. ⋯ Tools that measure the impact of pain may be a more valuable screening instrument than the NRS. Further research is now needed to determine if measuring the impact of pain in clinical practice is more effective at triggering appropriate management than more restricted measures of pain such as the NRS.