The Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project - a community-level, public health initiative to build community disaster resilience.

Public health officials need evidence-based methods for improving community disaster resilience and strategies for measuring results. This methods paper describes how one public health department is addressing this problem. This paper provides a detailed description of the theoretical rationale, intervention design and novel evaluation of the Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project (LACCDR), a public health program for increasing community disaster resilience.

Reconciling complexity and classification in quality improvement research.

Quality improvement (QI) research is often hampered by the complexity of the systems and context in which QI is attempted. Better classification of QI can alleviate this problem and help to build generalisable knowledge.

Racial and ethnic disparities and perceptions of health care: does health plan type matter?

Objective: To examine whether racial and ethnic differences in the distribution of individuals across types of health plans explain differences in satisfaction and trust with their physicians.

Data Sources: Data were derived from the 1998-1999 Community Tracking Household and Followback Studies and consisted of a nationwide sample of adults (18 years and older).

Data Collection: The data were collected by telephone survey.

A vision for health in our new century.

Our vision of good health is changing. Extraordinary progress was made over the course of the 20th century--life expectancy at birth increased by nearly 30 years and scientific insights revealed that our health fates are determined by interacting factors within each of the five major health domains. As life expectancies extend far beyond customary notions of old age, attention shifts from survival and toward improving the quality of life.