information becoming a doctor

With Doctor-Finder.biz you can find and compare docotor's in your area! Check it out! - Click here

To further our understanding of the role of a usual source of care in ensuring that adequate and continuous prevention can be provided to the population, this study examined the relative effectiveness of having a regular doctor as compared to a regular site on individuals'' use of various preventive services. Following Ettner (1996; 1999) and Kuder and Levitz (1985), in which the endogeneity of having a usual source of care was controlled for, this study answered the following questions:1. Does having a regular doctor have a greater impact on a patient''s receipt of preventive services than having a regular site?

II. THE NATIONAL NURSING HOME ENVIRONMENTThe percentage of elderly Americans is growing.(12) In 1997, 34.1 million elderly accounted for 12.7% of the U.S. population.(13) Roughly 4% of that elderly population elderly received care in 17,176 nursing homes providing approximately 1.8 million beds.(14) Expenditures to care for this population totaled $78.5 billion in 1997,(15) with Medicaid (48%) and private pay sources (31.4%) shouldering most of the burden.(16) The entrance of the Baby Boomers into the 65 and older age categories will double the number of elderly persons to approximately 70 million, or 20% of the population by 2030.(17) This growing elderly population will need adequate long-term care resources to meet its needs,(18) Although nursing homes are not always the preferred method of long-term care,(19) their importance and necessity in our society will only increase as America ages.

Over the past 5 years, a series of articles in leading American newspapers has revealed the extent to which the conduct of clinical trials may be affected by inducements offered by corporate research sponsors and accepted by some unscrupulous physicians. (1) The cases described were disturbing. They involved physicians engaged in excessive "enrollment activities" in exchange for money. Some of these physicians perpetrated fraud, falsifying their recruitment records in order to increase their profits. Others ignored exclusion criteria designed to ensure the safety of subjects and the validity of research results, referring their patients to research investigating treatments for conditions from which they did not suffer. (2) One of the articles reports that physicians focusing exclusively on commercial research regularly divulge annual incomes upwards of $1,000,000 with profits in excess of $300,000. Two physicians accumulated well over $10,000,000 through clinical trials activities in less than a decade. (3) Another article reported the role of finder''s fees and payments to parents in increasing the enrollment of children in medical research in the United States from 16,000 in 1997 to 45,000 in 2001. (4) It also highlighted the fact that subjects may be exposed to serious harm through referrals by zealous and inexperienced physicians, drawn to recruitment activity by offers of up to $5,000 per patient referred. Finally, several other "disturbing recruitment practices" were reported by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services'' Office of Inspector General in its report on subject recruitment practices. These include many cases of patients being harassed for participation; a nursing home resident being told to participate in research or leave the home; and a subject who died and was later found not to have met the inclusion criteria for the study. (5)

With Doctor-Finder.biz you can find and compare docotor's in your area! Check it out!