Journal of evaluation in clinical practice
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Given the increasing emphasis being placed on managing patients with chronic diseases within primary care, there is a need to better understand which primary care organizational attributes affect the quality of care that patients with chronic diseases receive. This study aimed to identify, summarize and compare data collection tools that describe and measure organizational attributes used within the primary care setting worldwide. ⋯ There is a need to collect primary care organizational attribute information at a national level to better understand factors affecting the quality of chronic disease prevention and management across a given country. The data collection tools identified in this review can be used to establish data collection strategies to collect this important information.
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The concept of emergence offers a new way of thinking about multimorbidity and chronic disease. ⋯ Multimorbidity and chronic disease are the end results of ongoing perturbations and interconnected activities of simpler substructures that collectively constitute the complex adaptive superstructure known as us, the person or patient. Medical interventions cause perturbations of many different subsystems within the patient, hence they are not limited to the person's bodily function, but also affect his general health perception and his interactions with his external environments. Changes in these domains inevitably have consequences on body function, and close the feedback loop of illness/disease, recovery and regained health.
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Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has emerged as an effective strategy to improve health care quality. The aim of this study was to systematically review and carry out an analysis on the barriers to EBM. ⋯ The result of this study shows that there are many barriers to the implementation and use of EBM. Identifying barriers is just the first step to removing barriers to the use of EBM. Extra resources will be needed if these barriers are to be tackled.
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Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has emerged as an effective strategy to improve health care quality. The aim of this study was to systematically review and carry out an analysis on the barriers to EBM. ⋯ The result of this study shows that there are many barriers to the implementation and use of EBM. Identifying barriers is just the first step to removing barriers to the use of EBM. Extra resources will be needed if these barriers are to be tackled.
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The practicing doctor, and most obviously the primary care clinician who encounters the full complexity of patients, faces several fundamental but intrinsically related theoretical and practical challenges - strongly actualized by so-called medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) and multi-morbidity. Systems medicine, which is the emerging application of systems biology to medicine and a merger of molecular biomedicine, systems theory and mathematical modelling, has recently been proposed as a primary care-centered strategy for medicine that promises to meet these challenges. Significantly, it has been proposed to do so in a way that at first glance may seem compatible with humanistic medicine. More specifically, it is promoted as an integrative, holistic, personalized and patient-centered approach. In this article, we ask whether and to what extent systems medicine can provide a comprehensive conceptual account of and approach to the patient and the root causes of health problems that can be reconciled with the concept of the patient as a person, which is an essential theoretical element in humanistic medicine. ⋯ We argue that, although systems biological concepts, notably Noble's theory of biological relativity and downward causation, are highly relevant for understanding human beings and health problems, they are nevertheless insufficient in fully bridging the gap to humanistic medicine. Systems biologists are currently unable to conceptualize living wholes, and seem unable to account for meaning, value and symbolic interaction, which are central concepts in humanistic medicine, as constraints on human health. Accordingly, systems medicine as currently envisioned cannot be said to be integrative, holistic, personalized or patient-centered in a humanistic medical sense.