Simulated standardized patients (SPs) are trained individuals who pose incognito as people seeking treatment in a health care setting. With the method's increasing use and popularity, we propose some standards to adapt the method to contextual considerations of feasibility, and we discuss current issues with the SP method and the experience of…

The involvement of non-researcher contributors (eg, stakeholders, patients and the public, decision and policy makers, experts, lay contributors) has taken a variety of forms within evidence syntheses. Realist reviews are a form of evidence synthesis that involves non-researcher contributors yet this practice has received little attention. In…

Objectives: T? report challenges encountered during the extraction process from Cochrane reviews in mental health and Campbell reviews and to indicate their implications on the empirical performance of different methods to handle missingness. Methods: We used a collection of meta-analyses on binary outcomes collated from a previous work on missing…

Health Information Technologies (HIT) are becoming increasingly integrated into patient care and nursing practice. The literature notes that the incorporation of these technologies is not only having an impact on the skills required of bedside nurses, but on nurse leaders from the unit-level to executive positions. Past research has resulted in…

The field of clinical research has changed considerably in the past 20 years. As the work in this realm has come to embody far more than the pursuit of improved patient care, this has meant that staff supporting the research are asked to take on additional responsibilities, learn new processes, and be continuously educated on modernized policies…

The consumer health information (CHI) movement is the result of various twentieth-century ideologies and is an outgrowth of the broader consumer movement. From a sociocultural and political perspective, the consumer, civil rights, and women's movements and related societal shifts helped pave the way for the consumer health movement, which laid the…

Two current evaluation projects of the Family Nurse Practitioner Training Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill compare the utilization or quality of services provided by graduates practicing in different care settings. Clinical trial studies are essential first steps in assessing an innovation in health care delivery. (EA)

Factor analytic development of various measures of consumer perceptions regarding characteristics of doctors and health care services is described. Findings are discussed in relation to program planning and evaluation in medical education, and suggestions for future research are noted. (Editor/JT)

Topics included in this annotated bibliography on patient education are (1) background on development of patient education programs, (2) patient education interventions, (3) references for health professionals, and (4) research and evaluation in patient education. (TA)