What Contract? With Whom? For What Purpose?

The central point in the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the Federal Trade Commission's action against the North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners was that they acted without proper supervision from the State of North Carolina in curbing commercial activity: issuing cease and desist orders to teeth-whitening businesses, for example.

Specialists understanding of the health care preferences of chronically ill adolescents.

Purpose: Doctors must understand patients' priorities to create an effective treatment partnership. Little is known about whether subspecialist pediatricians understand chronically ill adolescents' preferences.

Methods: A survey was conducted of 155 adolescents with chronic illnesses and 52 subspecialty physicians recruited from the same clinics of a children's hospital.

Health care preferences and priorities of adolescents with chronic illnesses.

Background: Efforts to make health care for adolescents with chronic illnesses more patient-centered must be grounded in an understanding and clear measures of adolescents' preferences and priorities.

Objective: To develop a measure of health care preferences of adolescents with chronic illnesses and to determine demographic, developmental, and health factors associated with adolescents' preferences.

Design: Mixed-method questionnaire development and survey.

North Carolina Institute of Medicine Task Force on the North Carolina Nursing Workforce (2004).

North Carolina is indeed fortunate to have avoided many of the extreme shortages of nurses reported in other states. Yet, there are important developments on the horizon that have the potential to cause such shortages. Taking action today to expand the production of new nurses, enhance their education, augment school-to-work transitions, and improve the nursing workplace environment can help reduce the likelihood of a future nursing workforce crisis.

The challenge and potential of childhood immunization registries.

Recent efforts to attain near-complete coverage of child populations by recommended vaccines have included initiatives by federal and state agencies, as well as private foundations, to develop and implement statewide or community-based childhood immunization registries. Plans for a single, national registry have been set aside in favor of a national network of local and state registries linked through the use of common definitions and unique child identifiers. However, both operational/technical and financing difficulties have slowed their development.