Designing the primary health care centre of the future: a community experience.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe and assess the process undertaken by Capital Health responsible for planning and developing a new primary care centre in an older urban, and demographically mixed neighbourhood in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Design/methodology/approach: The approach to the paper is to describe how health centres, if they are to be fully effective in terms of meeting community needs, need more than technical excellence; they also need to fit into the community where they are to be located. Primary care centres, through helping people stay healthy and manage their own health in their own communities, can be an essential antidote to the challenges presented by an aging population.

Are continuity clinic patients less satisfied when residents have a heavy inpatient workload?

The purpose of this study was to assess the influence of resident non-clinic workload on the satisfaction of continuity clinic patients. Over a 2-month period in 2002, residents and patients were surveyed at the University of Kentucky internal medicine continuity clinic. Residents provided a self-report of their non-clinic workload as light or medium versus heavy or extremely heavy.

Can physicians improve patient satisfaction with long waiting times?

The purpose of our study was to determine how time spent with the physician might be related to patient dissatisfaction with their waiting time. During a 2-month period, patients in our internal medicine resident continuity clinic completed a survey assessing their satisfaction with their waiting time and their estimates of their waiting time and time spent with the resident physician. For patients with long waiting times (more than 15 min in the waiting room or more than 10 min in the exam room), patient dissatisfaction with waiting time was associated with a shorter physician visit (48% were dissatisfied if the physician spent less than 15 min vs.

A learning perspective on caring: a view from the ground up.

In an interview, an adult learner with the Canadian School of Management discusses her research proposal aimed at strengthening the capability of the facility where she works to deal with clients suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other forms of dementia. The learner describes her motivation for this kind of work. She describes how she will apply some of the action learning principles recently learned to bring a mix of people together to discuss and work through issues relating to the care of clients residing in the Alzheimer unit.