Academic Health Centers and nonprofit hospitals are exploring strategies to meet Affordable Care Act mandates requiring tax-exempt institutions to address community health needs, which commonly include major chronic illnesses. We explore the implications of this regulatory landscape, describing methods that nonprofit health care institutions are…

The need to attend to terminally ill persons and provide improved quality of living and dying should be a national priority in Canada. Hospice palliative care (HPC), a person-centered approach that addresses the needs of the whole person, improves the quality of living and dying of persons facing a life-threatening illness. To ensure Canadians are…

Multiculturalism is a familiar concept in many developed countries. While cultural competency training is part of most medical curricula, training in cultural psychiatry at the undergraduate level is typically minimal. It is important that medical graduates are both culturally competent and able to respond to the mental health needs of patients…

Nationwide, more than 13.5 million children have special healthcare needs and with increases in the prevalence and diagnosis of development disabilities, this number can be expected to increase in the coming years. For any child with special needs, it is very important that they have a medical home from which all services can be coordinated. The…

Reducing health inequalities is a key priority for the Scottish Government. Health authorities are expected to meet quality targets. The involvement of people with learning disabilities in health service review teams has been one of the initiatives used in by National Health Service Quality Improvement Scotland to empower patients and improve…

A group of 41 Tulsa Tech students and two instructors volunteered to the Mission of Mercy, a free, two-day dental clinic co-sponsored by the Oklahoma Dental Association, the Delta Dental of Oklahoma Charitable Foundation and the Oklahoma Dental Foundation held downtown at the Tulsa Convention Center. The clinic was designed to meet the critical…

Older adults often get lost in the process of assessment, diagnosis and service brokering. If our concern as care providers is to enable older persons to remain independent or in the community for as long as possible, we must tap into their personal values, cultural identity and health beliefs in order to foster enhanced health care communication.…

Although the presence of intellectual disability (ID) per se is not usually regarded as a health problem, the biopsychosocial implications of cognitive impairment contribute to the vulnerability of adult patients with ID in any healthcare system. The adult patient with ID differs from a patient in the general population in terms of health…

This paper describes the rationale for and the development of the Geriatric Oral Health Assessment Index (GOHAI). The GOHAI has demonstrated a high level of internal consistency and reliability. Poor GOHAI scores were significantly correlated to having fewer teeth, wearing a removable denture, and perceiving the need for dental treatment.…

To address the local health care needs of both patients and primary care providers in Montana, an integrated primary care and behavioral health family practice clinic was developed. In this paper we describe our experience with integrating mental health and substance abuse services into a primary care setting (a community health center) while…

The National Assembly on School-Based Health Care conducted the 2004-05 Census, the tenth count of school-based health centers (SBHCs) since 1986, to: (1) provide a better understanding of the role of SBHCs in meeting the needs of underserved children and adolescents; (2) collect up-to-date data on demographics, staffing services, operations,…