Articles: community-health-services.
-
Obstetrics and gynecology · Feb 1998
Comparative StudyA comparative evaluation of collaborative prenatal care.
To evaluate the effectiveness of an advanced-practice nurse-obstetrician collaborative prenatal practice. ⋯ An advanced-practice nurse-obstetrician collaborative practice may be implemented successfully and lead to acceptable perinatal outcomes, as judged by low birth weight and prematurity.
-
J Child Health Care · Jan 1998
Coping with loss: the development and evaluation of a children's bereavement project.
The 'Kingfisher Project' is a community-based programme of support groups for bereaved children. It has been developed by a multi-disciplinary group of workers from health, education, social services and the voluntary sector. Thirty-six children and young people have have been through the first five groups of the programme. ⋯ Evaluation indicates that the children and young people benefit in terms of increased social, behavioural, emotional and physical well-being. Two sub-groups appear to have benefited less: these are children and young people with learning difficulties, and teenage girls. Project evaluation has enabled workers to develop insights into the programme's strengths and weaknesses and has raised questions which merit further exploration.
-
Concern is often expressed that, in the future, screening for genetic risk will become too widespread. Haemoglobin disorders (the thalassaemias and sickle cell disorders) offer an excellent model for genetic screening, because they are common and severe. They are recessively inherited. ⋯ Carrier-screening programmes have been in place in several countries for over 20 years and now offer extensive practical experience of the problems of delivering the service equitably to entire populations. This experience suggests that the main risk is of too little rather than too much genetic screening, and of doing it badly, and demonstrates the need for a discipline of 'community genetics'. Here I propose that modern information technology has a central role in providing communities with adequate access to correct genetic information.