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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSoc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol
September 2015
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.
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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: 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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: 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.
Background: Influenza immunisation is recommended for all people aged ≥65 years and younger people with particular chronic diseases. The Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) has provided new financial incentives for influenza immunisation since 2004.
Aim: To determine the impact of the 2004 UK General Medical Services contract on the overall uptake of, and socioeconomic inequalities associated with, influenza immunisation.
Background: Late recovery of renal function in patients requiring dialysis is a well recognized but uncommon phenomenon. Moves to increase the number of live donor transplants and the recognition that early transplantation is associated with better graft survival means it is possible that patients who are going to recover renal function may be transplanted unnecessarily.
Design: Prospective survey of patients receiving dialysis for more than 90 d in south west Scotland from 1 January 1994 to 31 December 2005.
We derive constraints on cosmological parameters and the properties of the lensing galaxies from gravitational lens statistics based on the final Cosmic Lens All Sky Survey data. For a flat universe with a classical cosmological constant, we find that the present matter fraction of the critical density is Omega(m)=0.31(+0.
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