Indigenous health and community services employment in remote Northern Territory: a baseline examination of 2006 and 2001 Census data.

Objective: To establish a baseline of levels of Indigenous professional engagement in the health and community services sector in remote Northern Territory.

Design: Analysis of data from 2001 and 2006 Census.

Setting: Northern Territory - Balance Statistical Division.

The ARTS of risk management in rural and remote medicine.

Introduction: This paper describes an action research process (in which the researchers are active participants throughout the process of development, testing and refinement) to develop a framework for clinical risk assessment and management in the context of rural and remote medicine. The framework is needed to support educational, medicolegal and quality improvement processes in rural and remote medical practice.

Methods: The research process included identifying a problem and gradually developing a research question, developing a potential model for application in a specific context, refining the tool and piloting the tool in a limited context.

Compliance, culture, and the health of Indigenous people.

From the medical literature of the 70's to recent research, compliance has been named as an issue in the management of chronic disease, particularly in Indigenous contexts. Compliance can also be thought of as a universal problem that has different names in different contexts. In this paper compliance is described as a measure, with a numerator and a denominator, and progress towards better compliance is discussed in terms of manipulation of each element.

Surgical variables affecting swallowing in patients treated for oral/oropharyngeal cancer.

Background: Postoperative swallowing function may be influenced by a number of treatment variables; this study examines the relationship of various treatment factors to measures of swallow function.

Methods: Swallowing was examined with the modified barium swallow procedure in 144 patients surgically treated for oral or oropharyngeal cancer 3 months after healing. Univariate and multivariate correlations were used to examine the relationship between swallowing function and treatment.

Relating speech and swallow function to dropout in a longitudinal study of head and neck cancer.

The relation between functional outcome and dropout from a 12-month follow-up period was examined in a longitudinal study whose objective was to define and quantify the functional effects of oral surgical resection and reconstruction on speech and swallowing in patients with head and neck cancer. In a group of 150 patients recruited to a surgical study in the Cancer Control Science Program in Head and Neck Cancer Rehabilitation, dropout from all causes and dropout from specific causes (medical, patient, and administrative specific) were assessed in relation to longitudinal speech and swallow function. In univariate analysis, better speech articulation was associated with decreased risk of dropout from all causes and from medical-specific causes.