Journal of evaluation in clinical practice
-
This costing evaluation compares three service delivery models for ear, nose, and throat (ENT) surgery for remote living Indigenous children to improve their hearing outcomes, with the aim to identify the least costly model. ⋯ The sensitivity analyses also demonstrate that Model 3 would be the more economical model for providing ENT surgery for remote living children. By proving an accurate assessment of the true costs of delivering these important ear and hearing health services, strategic health service planners may be better informed and sufficient budgets can be allocated to provide improved service delivery. The benefits of Model 3, over Models 1 or 2, would also incorporate improvements to patient safety as a result of reducing patient travel, which should in-turn, reduce failure-to-attend rates.
-
Monash Watch (MW) aims to reduce potentially preventable hospitalisations in a cohort above a risk "threshold" identified by Health Links Chronic Care (HLCC) algorithms using personal, diagnostic, and service data. MW conducted regular patient monitoring through outbound phone calls using the Patient Journey Record System (PaJR). PaJR alerts are intended to act as a self-reported barometer of stressors, resilience, and health perceptions with more alerts per call indicating greater risk. ⋯ Both static and dynamic indicators representing stressors, resilience, and health perceptions have the potential to inform threshold models of admission risk in ways that could be clinically useful.
-
Much is written about "multimorbidity" as it is a difficult problem for health systems, as it reflects a complex phenomenon unique to each individual health journey and health service context. This paper proposes the adoption of 2 constructs or knowledge streams into mainstream "multimorbidity" care which are arguably most important to person-centered care-personal health perceptions and resilience. ⋯ Two phenomena of human systems-interoception and resilience-can guide care in the complex nature of multimorbidity in unstable health journeys and should be incorporated into clinical practice.
-
Racial discrimination has been increasingly reported to have a causal link with morbidity and mortality of Black Americans, yet this issue is rarely addressed in a public health perspective. Racism affects health at different levels: institutional racism is a structural and legalized system that results in differential access to health services; cultural racism refers to the negative racial stereotypes, often reinforced by media, that results in poorer psychological and physiological wellbeing of the minorities. Lastly, interpersonal racism refers to the persistence of racial prejudice that seriously undermines the doctor-patient relationship. ⋯ This study represents an important milestone in the application of public health on racial injustices, yet racism must be tackled with a sustained, multilevel, and interdisciplinary approach. In conclusion, this paper addresses how public health interventions can empower Black minorities and bring forward long-term policies. Racism is a structural and long-standing system that can be eliminated only with the collective effort.
-
The paper proposes that frameworks typical to metaphysics and art could be used in clinical treatment in somatic and psychiatric contexts to ensure improved care. The concept of the "body electric" of somatic patients which I introduced in previous work is developed further and paired with the "mind electric" of psychiatric patients. Both are defined as a patient's personally generated metaphysical possibility of being healthy-within-illness which is experientially actualized. ⋯ An argument against the idea implied by the hope for such mass treatments and corresponding overreliance on science, namely, that health comes from fixing and regularizing, is developed based on cultural history and the evidenced fact that personally assumed health, just like art and metaphysics, is transgressive of scientific data, and accommodates the untrue, the impossible or the irregular as actual and normal. Because normality is created only with the help of disorder and from within it for chronic patients, clinicians should offer them the metaphysical care they need to produce and actualize their possibility of irregular normality or their body/mind electric. Better treatments can only be provided when scientific advances will be matched with advances in the humanistic competence of clinicians.