Using Bradshaw's taxonomy of needs: listening to women in planning pregnancy care.

The schedule of antenatal care is dominated by what 'experts' perceive to be appropriate and is dominated by a biomedical model of health care. When providing care, the needs of women must be heard and incorporated into service provision. The term 'need' is subjective and socially constructed and as a concept, it is widely loosely defined.

A role for workforce competencies in evidence-based health promotion education.

Education programs should be based on research about the knowledge and skills required for practice, rather than on intuition or tradition, but there is limited published curriculum research on health promotion education. This paper describes a case study of how workforce competencies have been used to assist evidence-based health promotion education in the areas of curriculum design, selection of assessment tasks and continuous quality assurance processes in an undergraduate program at an Australian university. A curriculum-competency mapping process successfully identified gaps and areas of overlap in an existing program.

Community perspectives on the impact of policy change on linking social capital in a rural community.

Understanding what undermines or builds social capital is important when estimating the impact that changes in social capital have on people's lives. The aim of this paper is to illustrate how the consequences of neo-liberal policy initiatives have impacted on linking social capital in one small and vibrant rural community in Australia. Policy changes affecting all levels of government and various commercial agencies have undermined people's capability for a range of actions which bring personal and community-wide social and economic returns.

Conducting research in general practice: lessons learnt from experience.

Issue Addressed: The increased focus on evidence-based practice and the World Health Organization (WHO) settings approach to health promotion have contributed to an increase in the importance of health promotion activity and therefore research being undertaken in the general practice setting. Primary care-based trials represent major investments in time and resources for researchers, health professionals and patients, and there are several methodological and logistical issues that need to be considered. The costs of failed trials are potentially significant and include wasted resources, opportunity costs of participants' time and discouragement of primary care professionals from co-operating with further research.