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Adherence (compliance) And Concordance
In medicine, patient compliance (also adherence, capacitance) describes the degree to which a person correctly follows medical advice. Most commonly, it refers to medication or drug compliance, but it can also apply to other situations such as medical device use, self care, self-directed exercises, therapy sessions, or medical follow-up visits. Both patient and health-care provider affect compliance, and a positive physician-patient relationship is the most important factor in improving compliance. Access to care plays a role in patient adherence, whereby greater wait times to access care contributing to greater absenteeism. The cost of prescription medication and potential side effects also play a role. Compliance can be confused with concordance, which is the process by which a patient and clinician make decisions together about treatment. Worldwide, non-compliance is a major obstacle to the effective delivery of health care. 2003 estimates from the World Health Organization ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Self Care
Self-care has been defined as the process of establishing behaviors to ensure holistic well-being of oneself, to promote health, and actively manage illness when it occurs. Individuals engage in some form of self-care daily with food choices, exercise, sleep, and hygiene. Self-care is not only a solo activity, as the community—a group that supports the person performing self-care—overall plays a role in access to, implementation of, and success of self-care activities. Routine self-care is important when someone is not experiencing any symptoms of illness, but self-care becomes essential when illness occurs. General benefits of routine self-care include Preventive healthcare, prevention of illness, improved mental health, and comparatively better quality of life. Self-care practices vary from individual to individual. Self-care is seen as a partial solution to the global rise in health care costs that is placed on governments worldwide. A lack of self-care in terms of pers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Literacy
Literacy is the ability to read and write, while illiteracy refers to an inability to read and write. Some researchers suggest that the study of "literacy" as a concept can be divided into two periods: the period before 1950, when literacy was understood solely as alphabetical literacy (word and letter recognition); and the period after 1950, when literacy slowly began to be considered as a wider concept and process, including the social and cultural aspects of reading, writing, and functional literacy. Definition The range of definitions of literacy used by Non-governmental organization, NGOs, think tanks, and advocacy groups since the 1990s suggests that this shift in understanding from "discrete skill" to "social practice" is both ongoing and uneven. Some definitions remain fairly closely aligned with the traditional "ability to read and write" connotation, whereas others take a broader view: * The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (USA) included "quantitativ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Complementary And Alternative Medicine
Alternative medicine refers to practices that aim to achieve the healing effects of conventional medicine, but that typically lack biological plausibility, testability, repeatability, or supporting evidence of effectiveness. Such practices are generally not part of evidence-based medicine. Unlike modern medicine, which employs the scientific method to test plausible therapies by way of responsible and ethical clinical trials, producing repeatable evidence of either effect or of no effect, alternative therapies reside outside of mainstream medicine and do not originate from using the scientific method, but instead rely on testimonials, anecdotes, religion, tradition, superstition, belief in supernatural " energies", pseudoscience, errors in reasoning, propaganda, fraud, or other unscientific sources. Frequently used terms for relevant practices are New Age medicine, pseudo-medicine, unorthodox medicine, holistic medicine, fringe medicine, and unconventional medicine, with litt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Self-care
Self-care has been defined as the process of establishing behaviors to ensure holistic well-being of oneself, to promote health, and actively manage illness when it occurs. Individuals engage in some form of self-care daily with food choices, exercise, sleep, and hygiene. Self-care is not only a solo activity, as the community—a group that supports the person performing self-care—overall plays a role in access to, implementation of, and success of self-care activities. Routine self-care is important when someone is not experiencing any symptoms of illness, but self-care becomes essential when illness occurs. General benefits of routine self-care include Preventive healthcare, prevention of illness, improved mental health, and comparatively better quality of life. Self-care practices vary from individual to individual. Self-care is seen as a partial solution to the global rise in health care costs that is placed on governments worldwide. A lack of self-care in terms of pers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Preventive Treatment
A therapy or medical treatment is the attempted remediation of a health problem, usually following a medical diagnosis. Both words, ''treatment'' and ''therapy'', are often abbreviated tx, Tx, or Tx. As a rule, each therapy has indications and contraindications. There are many different types of therapy. Not all therapies are effective. Many therapies can produce unwanted adverse effects. ''Treatment'' and ''therapy'' are often synonymous, especially in the usage of health professionals. However, in the context of mental health, the term ''therapy'' may refer specifically to psychotherapy. Semantic field The words ''care'', ''therapy'', ''treatment'', and ''intervention'' overlap in a semantic field, and thus they can be synonymous depending on context. Moving rightward through that order, the connotative level of holism decreases and the level of specificity (to concrete instances) increases. Thus, in health-care contexts (where its senses are always noncount), t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ambulatory Care
Ambulatory care or outpatient care is Health care, medical care provided on an outpatient basis, including diagnosis, observation, consultation, treatment, intervention, and rehabilitation services. This care can include advanced medical technology and Medical procedure, procedures even when provided outside of hospitals. Ambulatory care sensitive conditions (ACSC) are health conditions where appropriate ambulatory care prevents or reduces the need for hospital admission (or ''inpatient'' care), such as diabetes or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Canadian Institute for Health InformationAmbulatory Care Sensitive Conditions. Accessed 14 April 2014. Many medical investigations and treatments for acute and chronic illnesses and preventive health care can be performed on an ambulatory basis, including minor surgical and medical procedures, most types of dental services, dermatology services, and many types of Medical diagnosis, diagnostic procedures (e.g. blood tests, Medical im ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Health Screening
In medicine, screening is a strategy used to look for as-yet-unrecognised conditions or risk markers. This testing can be applied to individuals or to a whole population without symptoms or signs of the disease being screened. Screening interventions are designed to identify conditions which could at some future point turn into disease, thus enabling earlier intervention and management in the hope to reduce mortality and suffering from a disease. Although screening may lead to an earlier diagnosis, not all screening tests have been shown to benefit the person being screened; overdiagnosis, misdiagnosis, and creating a false sense of security are some potential adverse effects of screening. Additionally, some screening tests can be inappropriately overused. For these reasons, a test used in a screening program, especially for a disease with low incidence, must have good sensitivity in addition to acceptable specificity. Several types of screening exist: universal (population ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tuskegee Syphilis Study
The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (informally referred to as the Tuskegee Experiment or Tuskegee Syphilis Study) was a study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on a group of nearly 400 African American men with syphilis. The purpose of the study was to observe the effects of the disease when untreated, though by the end of the study medical advancements meant it was entirely treatable. The men were not informed of the nature of the experiment, and more than 100 died as a result. The Public Health Service started the study in 1932 in collaboration with Tuskegee University (then the Tuskegee Institute), a Historically black colleges and universities, historically Black college in Alabama. In the study, investigators enrolled 600 impoverished African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama. Of these men, 399 had latent syphilis, with a control g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Language Proficiency
Language proficiency is the ability of an individual to use language with a level of accuracy which transfers meaning in production and comprehension. Definition There is no singular definition of language proficiency: while certain groups limit its scope to speaking ability, others extend it to cover both productive language and receptive language skills and their effective application in varying practical contexts. However, this diversity has implications for its application in other language domains such as literacy, testing, endangered languages, language impairment. There is little consistency as to how different organizations classify it. As of 2014, native-level fluency was estimated to require a lexicon between 20,000 and 40,000 words, but basic conversational fluency might require as few as 3,000 words. Development Developing proficiency in any language begins with word learning. By the time they are 12 months old, children learn their first words and by the time t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polypharmacy
Polypharmacy (polypragmasia) is an umbrella term to describe the simultaneous use of multiple medicines by a patient for their conditions. The term polypharmacy is often defined as regularly taking five or more medicines but there is no standard definition and the term has also been used in the context of when a person is prescribed 2 or more medications at the same time. Polypharmacy may be the consequence of having multiple long-term conditions, also known as multimorbidity and is more common in the elderly. In some cases, an excessive number of medications at the same time is worrisome, especially for people who are older with many chronic health conditions, because this increases the risk of an adverse event in that population. In many cases, polypharmacy cannot be avoided, but 'appropriate polypharmacy' practices are encouraged to decrease the risk of adverse effects. Appropriate polypharmacy is defined as the practice of prescribing for a person who has multiple conditions or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Service Framework
A National Service Framework (NSF) was any of several policies set by the National Health Service (NHS) in England to define standards of care for major medical issues such as cancer, coronary heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, kidney disease, long-term conditions, mental health, old age, and stroke care. NSFs were ten-year plans developed in partnership with health professionals, patients, carers, health service managers, voluntary agencies and other experts. The two main roles of NSFs were to: * Set clear quality requirements for care based on the best available evidence of what treatments and services work most effectively for patients. * Offer strategies and support to help organisations meet these requirements. The first NSF was published in 1999. NSFs were discontinued in 2013 with the formation of NHS England NHS England, formally the NHS Commissioning Board for England, is an executive non-departmental public body of the Department of He ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reading Level
Readability is the ease with which a Reading (process), reader can understand a written text. The concept exists in both natural language and programming languages though in different forms. In natural language, the readability of text depends on its Content (media), content (the complexity of its vocabulary and syntax) and its presentation (such as typographic aspects that affect legibility, like font size, line height, Kerning, character spacing, and line length). In Computer programming, programming, things such as programmer Comment (computer programming), comments, choice of Control flow#Loops, loop structure, and Naming convention (programming), choice of names can determine Computer programming#Readability of source code, the ease with which humans can read computer program code. Higher readability in a text eases reading effort and speed for the general population of readers. For those who do not have high reading comprehension, readability is necessary for understanding ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
