Canadian family physician Médecin de famille canadien
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To profile the health of deaf and hard-of-hearing Canadians in relation to the population as a whole. ⋯ Communication is essential to both health promotion and health care delivery. Deafness-both the disability and the culture-creates barriers to communication. Individual practitioners can and should consider the communication needs of individual patients with hearing loss or deafness to avoid barriers to optimal health.
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To measure family practice patients' adherence to statin medications and to identify factors associated with adherence to these medications. ⋯ Almost two-thirds (63%) of patients who were prescribed statins by their family physicians reported high adherence to the medications. Strategies to improve adherence would best be directed at patients who are younger or taking fewer than 4 or more than 6 other prescribed medications. Patients should be encouraged to maintain a lifestyle of regular exercise and a healthy diet, as this was associated with better adherence to statin medications.
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To compare maternal outcomes of cesarean sections performed by GPs with the outcomes of those performed by specialists. ⋯ Although major morbidity was higher among GPs' patients, differences were entirely attributable to the rate of postpartum infection. Infection rates in both groups were far below expected rates. The observation that blood transfusion and surgical error rates were similar suggests that surgical technique was not the cause of differences between groups. We conclude that these GPs with a mean of 4 months' training subsequently performed cesarean sections with an acceptable degree of safety compared with specialists.