Compassionate containment? Balancing technical safety and therapy in the design of psychiatric wards.

This paper contributes to the international literature examining design of inpatient settings for mental health care. Theoretically, it elaborates the connections between conceptual frameworks from different strands of literature relating to therapeutic landscapes, social control and the social construction of risk. It does so through a discussion of the substantive example of research to evaluate the design of a purpose built inpatient psychiatric health care facility, opened in 2010 as part of the National Health Service (NHS) in England.

African American beliefs about diabetes.

In this presentation, a diabetes explanatory model of rural, African American adults at high risk for diabetes is described. Kleinman's explanatory model of illness was used as the organizing framework. African American men and women (N=42), between the ages of 18 and 51, participated.

Diabetes beliefs among low-income, white residents of a rural North Carolina community.

Context: Every social group shares beliefs about health and illness. Knowledge and understanding of these health beliefs are essential for education programs to address health promotion and illness prevention.

Purpose: This analysis describes the diabetes Explanatory Models of Illness (EMs) of low-income, rural, white Southerners who have not been diagnosed with diabetes.

Children's health and workers' productivity: an examination of family interference with work in rural America.

This article examines the association of children's health with their parents' performance in the workplace using data from a random survey sample of adults living in rural western North Carolina (N=206). Guided by the effort-recovery model, the authors hypothesized that parents whose children are more ill have poorer performance in the workplace because their parenting requires greater effort and they have less opportunity for physical and psychological recovery. Child health was unassociated with parents cutting back at work because of physical health.

A suite of methods for representing activity space in a healthcare accessibility study.

Background: "Activity space" has been used to examine how people's habitual movements interact with their environment, and can be used to examine accessibility to healthcare opportunities. Traditionally, the standard deviational ellipse (SDE), a Euclidean measure, has been used to represent activity space. We describe the construction and application of the SDE at one and two standard deviations, and three additional network-based measures of activity space using common tools in GIS: the road network buffer (RNB), the 30-minute standard travel time polygon (STT), and the relative travel time polygon (RTT).

Identifying diabetes knowledge network nodes as sites for a diabetes prevention program.

This paper reports on the methods used and results of a study that identified specific places within a community that have the potential to be sites for a diabetes prevention program. These sites, termed diabetes knowledge network nodes (DKNNs), are based on the concept of socio-spatial knowledge networks (SSKNs), the web of social relationships within which people obtain knowledge about type 2 diabetes. The target population for the study was working poor African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans of both sexes in a small rural southern town who had not been diagnosed with diabetes.

Access to transportation and health care utilization in a rural region.

Context: Access to transportation to transverse the large distances between residences and health services in rural settings is a necessity. However, little research has examined directly access to transportation in analyses of rural health care utilization.

Purpose: This analysis addresses the association of transportation and health care utilization in a rural region.

The effects of geography and spatial behavior on health care utilization among the residents of a rural region.

Objective: This analysis determines the importance of geography and spatial behavior as predisposing and enabling factors in rural health care utilization, controlling for demographic, social, cultural, and health status factors.

Data Sources: A survey of 1,059 adults in 12 rural Appalachian North Carolina counties.

Study Design: This cross-sectional study used a three-stage sampling design stratified by county and ethnicity.

Diabetes meanings among those without diabetes: explanatory models of immigrant Latinos in rural North Carolina.

The prevalence of type 2 diabetes is increasing in the United States, particularly among minority individuals. Primary prevention programs for diabetes must be designed to address the beliefs of the populations they target. Little research has investigated the beliefs of those who do not have diabetes.

Determinants of health care use by children in rural western North Carolina: results from the Mountain Accessibility Project.

Objective: To assess determinants of health care visits among children in a 12-county region of western North Carolina representative of rural areas in the United States.

Methods: Households were randomly selected for surveys of household characteristics, health status, and health care use. Surveys were conducted June 1999 to January 2000 and were stratified for children younger than 5 years and 5 years and older.

A spatial analysis of county-level variation in hospitalization rates for low back problems in North Carolina.

Hospitalization rates for low back problems vary widely. In previous non-spatial analyses, population-level socioeconomic and health resource characteristics have explained little of the variation in rates. This study examines geographic variation in hospitalization rates for low back problems while controlling for spatial dependence in the data.

Sociospatial knowledge networks: appraising community as place.

This article introduces a new theory of geographical analysis, sociospatial knowledge networks, for examining and understanding the spatial aspects of health knowledge (i.e., exactly where health beliefs and knowledge coincide with other support in the community).