Validation of an instrument to assess patient attitudes towards prescribing of pharmaceuticals by doctors.

Objectives: To establish the reliability and validity of a questionnaire designed to assess Chinese patients' attitudes towards pharmaceuticals that may influence the prescribing behaviours of their doctors.

Study Design: A draft questionnaire of 48 items was designed in English, translated into Chinese, and then back-translated into English. After establishing for content and face validity, it was administered to a convenience sample of patients.

Should adolescents be vaccinated against hepatitis A: the Hong Kong experience.

Hong Kong is a well developed city in the center of an endemic region for hepatitis A. The age at which hepatitis A occurs has shifted from childhood and adolescence to adults like many western countries. There is a high chance of outbreaks with the introduction of infection from neighbouring countries.

Changing hepatitis A epidemiology among Hong Kong Chinese adolescents: what are the implications?

Objective: To study the sero-epidemiology of hepatitis A virus (HAV) among adolescents in Hong Kong and analyse the changing patterns of the infection rates.

Design: Cross sectional study.

Setting: Secondary school students.

The trouble with family medicine.

Background: The trouble with family medicine is that the perceptual framework it uses to view the phenomena of health and illness is at variance with the frameworks traditionally used by medicine generally. This creates difficulties in communication between those in family medicine and those in other disciplines, and sometimes leads to misunderstanding of the nature of the discipline of family medicine and its place in the health care system. Those who practise family medicine need to be 'multilingual', able to understand and speak the language and use the metaphors of family medicine, yet equally able to use the language and metaphors of other disciplines.