Widening access to medicine may improve general practitioner recruitment in deprived and rural communities: survey of GP origins and current place of work.

Background: Widening access to medicine in the UK is a recalcitrant problem of increasing political importance, with associated strong social justice arguments but without clear evidence of impact on service delivery. Evidence from the United States suggests that widening access may enhance care to underserved communities. Additionally, rural origin has been demonstrated to be the factor most strongly associated with rural practice.

Greater number of group identifications is associated with lower odds of being depressed: evidence from a Scottish community sample.

Purpose: Group identification has been shown to be associated with reduced risk of depression, but this research has important limitations. Our aim was to establish a robust link between group identification and depression whilst overcoming previous studies' shortcomings.

Methods: 1824 participants, recruited from General Practice throughout Scotland, completed a questionnaire measuring their identification with three groups (family, community, and a group of their choice), as well as their intensity of contact with each group.

The pain of low status: the relationship between subjective socio-economic status and analgesic prescriptions in a Scottish community sample.

There is a strong positive relationship between objective measures of socio-economic status (OSS) and general health. However, there is an increasing interest in the relationship between health and subjective socio-economic status (SSS), which describes one's perceived rank in relation to the rest of the society, based on factors such as income, occupation and education. While the relationship between SSS and general health is well established, the relationship between SSS and pain has received little attention.

Greater number of group identifications is associated with healthier behaviour: Evidence from a Scottish community sample.

Objectives: This paper investigates the interplay between group identification (i.e., the extent to which one has a sense of belonging to a social group, coupled with a sense of commonality with in-group members) and four types of health behaviour, namely physical exercise, smoking, drinking, and diet.

Epidemiology of multimorbidity and implications for health care, research, and medical education: a cross-sectional study.

Background: Long-term disorders are the main challenge facing health-care systems worldwide, but health systems are largely configured for individual diseases rather than multimorbidity. We examined the distribution of multimorbidity, and of comorbidity of physical and mental health disorders, in relation to age and socioeconomic deprivation.

Methods: In a cross-sectional study we extracted data on 40 morbidities from a database of 1,751,841 people registered with 314 medical practices in Scotland as of March, 2007.