Women, the welfare state, and their transnational dimension: the case of Mexico's community health worker programs.

Feminist scholarship has shown that the welfare state is not only a set of agencies and policies to distribute services, but is engaged in the promotion of normative concepts of the female through its structural arrangements and the content of its programs and policies. Yet, this scholarship conceptualizes the state as a national entity and free from external influences, ignoring its transnational dimension. States are embedded in an international network consisting of other states, international agencies, and corporations that influence the practices and discursive frame of the welfare state.

Hospital length of stay in the United States and Japan: a case study of myocardial infarction patients.

Patients in Japan stay in the hospital significantly longer than those in the United States. This study investigates factors that may account for the difference from a sociocultural perspective. In an intensive case study on patients with uncomplicated acute myocardial infarction at a university hospital in Japan and its U.

New assumptions concerning IPAs and cost of dental care.

Objectives: Previous studies suggest that fee-for-service (FFS) patients receive more treatment and at a greater cost than capitation patients. In this study treatment plans of dentists who are members of an independent practice association (IPA), a preferred provider organization (PPO), or who are paid their usual fee for service are compared.

Methods: A carefully selected and trained professional actor, with actual dental disease and recent radiographs, was sent to the offices of general practice dentists for an examination and treatment plan.

Infection control in the dental office: has anything changed?

Using data collected in two studies, the authors compare infection control practices used in dental offices in 1988 and 1992. During that time, dentists increased their use of barrier protection but still asked and learned very little about their patients. This lack of communication hinders dentists' ability to deliver the best care possible.

Perception of the need for removal of impacted third molars by general dentists and oral and maxillofacial surgeons.

This prospective study investigated the influence of professional training and method of payment on how dental practitioners planned extraction of impacted third molars. The subjects were four groups of dental practitioners in metropolitan Chicago: 1) general dentists in traditional fee-for-service practice; 2) general dentists who were members of a preferred provider organization; 3) general dentists who were members of an Independent Practice Association model of a capitation system; and 4) oral and maxillofacial surgeons, all of whom were in fee-for-service practice. A carefully selected and trained professional actress, in good health, with four unerupted, impacted, and asymptomatic third molars, brought her recently taken full mouth periapical and panoramic radiographs to randomly selected dentists for a consultation.

Actions speak louder than words: implications of a dental experiment.

This study reports on an experiment to determine whether dentists would, in actual office practice, be willing to treat men they perceive to be homosexual. The data show an overwhelming percentage of dentists to be homophobic in some degree and a majority felt they did not have an ethical obligation to treat AIDS patients. However, the study found that an even larger majority of dentists would treat persons with AIDS.