Results of ALIVE: A Faith-Based Pilot Intervention to Improve Diet Among African American Church Members.

Background: A key intervention to address Black-White health disparities in cardiovascular disease (CVD) is to improve diet quality, especially vegetable consumption, among African Americans. However, effective and sustainable interventions are lacking for this population.

Objective: Conduct a proof-of-concept study to measure the feasibility of implementing and rigorously assessing a novel, culturally tailored church-based intervention to improve vegetable consumption and total diet quality among African Americans.

Chaplains and quality improvement: can we make our case by improving our care?

To date, the field of health care chaplaincy has little information about what constitutes "quality spiritual care. "A qualitative study of four focus groups in New York, Illinois, Arizona, and California was conducted to gather preliminary information about how health care chaplains' experience and understand "quality" and "quality improvement" in spiritual care. The study revealed that many chaplains feel a tension inherent in the task of measuring spiritual care services; how does one evaluate interactions that may seem ineffable? The study also enumerated chaplains' creative efforts, often shaped by institutional contexts and cultures, to address these difficulties in measuring spiritual services.

Learning to provide end-of-life care: postgraduate medical training programs in Michigan.

Purpose: A statewide survey of postgraduate medical training programs was conducted to determine the current status of training related to end-of-life (EOL) care and hospice care training.

Methods: A mail survey of 275 program directors was conducted with a response rate of 70%. The questionnaire focused on information about training in EOL care and hospice care: specific content, required and elective experiences, teaching formats, and program directors' ratings of the perceived adequacy of training.

Ethics, professionalism, and humanities at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine.

This article describes the variety of approaches used at Michigan State University's College of Human Medicine for teaching ethics, professionalism, and humanities to undergraduate medical students: courses in ethics and health policy; mentoring programs; selectives in history, literature, and spirituality; structured patient care experiences; and discussions with students in their clinical years on the ethical and professional challenges confronting them in their clinical experiences. Some of these approaches, such as the structured patient-care experience, may be unique to Michigan State. The authors place special emphasis on discussing the challenges that confront this curriculum, including struggles to keep up with the pace of change in the health care system, preserving and highlighting the linkages between the "ethics" and the "professionalism" strands of the curriculum, making optimal use of Web technologies, successfully communicating to students the ultimately practical importance of the medical humanities other than ethics, and solving the problems of geography created by a widely dispersed community campus system.

Muddling through a merger: a qualitative study of two combined family practice residencies.

Background And Objectives: Mergers of residency training programs have become more common, but little has been published about their educational impact. Following our own merger, we sought to understand this process and its aftermath by conducting focus groups.

Methods: Three 1-hour focus groups were conducted-one with third-year residents, one with first- and second-year residents, and one with core faculty members.