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The article offers an overview about the rapid changes occurring in nursing in recent times. The developments of the nursing profession in the XX century involve bioethical, technical and social issues.
The Program for Advanced Standing Students at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine accepts highly qualified individuals who have earned a dental degree in a foreign country. They earn an American dental degree in two years, following a program that is nearly identical to the final years of the traditional DMD program. PASS students have been highly successful in their educational program and they contribute in diverse ways to the dental profession upon graduation.
In legislation concerning the transfusion of AIDS, the issue of whether blood banking is a profession has become extremely important. The status of blood banking determines how blood center actions will be judged and what liability rules will be applied. The issue was recently hotly argued in the high courts of Colorado and Florida. The courts' decisions impact not only on the outcome of other lawsuits regarding the transfusion of AIDS against blood banks, but also on the way blood bank practices will be made in the future.
The originality of this research lies in its object, nurses salaries, a subject that is often discussed amongst professionals, yet rarely broached in writing. The concepts of salaries and salaried workers are examined, then, through literature, a list of salary data from 1845 to 1945 is made. The study of nursing personnel salaries from 1945 to 2001 begins with a reconstruction of salary charts, continuing with an internal analysis of the private and semi-public sector, then alternatively with the teachers. This work provides objective information on the aspect of this profession's salaries and uncovers numerous questions on the origins of wage increases.
The experiences of 94 Canterbury families with young handicapped children are reported as these impinge on the medical and nursing professions. Some suggestions for the improvement of medical counseling services are made in the light of the findings and the literature.
Residency education has enjoyed relatively slow but steady growth since its inception in the mid-1970s. A certain segment of recent graduates consider graduation from optometry school as entry level and perceive the need for additional clinical education. The creation of new residency programs and the expansion of existing ones may occur in a variety of settings. For residency education to realize its full potential, optometry must seek federal support for post-graduate clinical education. This would be consistent with federal support provided to other professions for the support of post-graduate clinical education.
There is a need to expand the number of optometric residencies to meet the current increased demand from graduates seeking to fill the expanding number of residency positions, as well as the projected needs of the profession for the 21st century. Supportive rationales and recommendations for potential development of residencies are discussed.
The health professions, including optometry, are facing a declining applicant pool. The American Optometric Association has taken steps to address the challenge of increasing the pool of qualified applicants to the schools and colleges of optometry. However, the most significant factor in the process will be the efforts of individual AOA members.
The Surgeon General's Report on Oral Health remains a baseline document for addressing the issues of oral health disparities in America. With the problems of access to care and quality of care, cultural differences, history of discrimination, and ongoing severity of poverty, today there are many disturbing disparities in oral health status between people of color and the majority population. While the number of people of color is increasing, the number being prepared to provide quality oral health care is declining. The nation, the dental profession, and dental schools have not made adequate progress in the effort to develop a workforce that can address the disparities in oral health problems based on race and ethnicity. The Office of the Surgeon General is developing a National Oral Health Action Plan to help address these problems, but the role of dental schools is critical. Building a pipeline that will bring diverse people to the dental workforce must be a high priority for all involved. A substantial improvement in the diversity of the oral health student body and eventual workforce is a critical and essential element to achieving the goals of improving oral health and quality of life and eliminating health disparities.
The diverse needs of students, faculty, administrators, and the curriculum itself, create formidable challenges when attempting to integrate mobile technology into a health professions curriculum. Single technology solutions often fail in this environment because they cannot meet user needs. Multiple platform and device agnostic solutions can provide the flexibility to address curricular needs without significantly adding technological complexity.
OBJECTIVE: To compare the number and nature of the complaints, the complainants, the accused health professionals and the sanctions imposed by the disciplinary boards before and after the Individual Health Care Professions Act (IHCP Act) came into effect at the end of 1997. DESIGN: Descriptive, retrospective. METHOD: The authors examined all 4980 verdicts pronounced by the disciplinary boards in the first instance during the period 1995-1997 (before the IHCP Act) and then during the period 1999-2001 (after the IHCP Act), together with the resulting appeal procedures involving physicians, dentists, pharmacists and midwives. The following were noted: the year of the verdict, the number and nature of the complaints, the types of complainants, the categories of professionals accused, the nature of the verdicts, and the number of appeal procedures. RESULTS: During the first period, 2453 complaints were brought before the disciplinary board, compared to 2527 during the second period. Most of the complaints were made against physicians (92% in both periods). The number of complaints that were declared to be justified fell from 19% to 15% (p < 0.001). In both periods, approximately half of the complaints concerned 'lack of care or inadequate care' or 'incorrect treatment', the most frequent verdict was a warning (67% and 72%, respectively), and appeals were lodged against almost one-third of the verdicts. The number of complaints submitted by the Inspectorate for Health Care decreased from 47 to 19. CONCLUSION: In any important aspects, the IHCP Act did not lead to improvement in the disciplinary jurisprudence. The decrease in the number of complaints that were declared to be justified could be explained by the change in composition of the disciplinary boards prescribed by the IHCP Act (more lawyers and less fellow professionals). Informing citizens about disciplinary jurisprudence and other procedures for lodging complaints may increase the number of justified complaints and hence the number of 'justified' verdicts. There is a need for further clarification of the tasks and responsibility of the Inspectorate for Health Care in case of complaints to the disciplinary boards.
Information about the use of research by rehabilitation professionals to make clinical decisions in everyday practice is limited. This study compared perceived research use and knowledge sources across professions, practice situations, and work environments. Participants were 165 randomly selected Canadian occupational therapists, physical therapists, and speech-language pathologists. Self-report ratings during an interview, an interviewer rating, and questionnaire scores (Edmonton Research Orientation Survey, General Use of Research, Knowledge Acquisition Survey) were compared. Speech-language pathologists had the most education and the highest research use ratings. Research use was highest during program planning. Programs to encourage research use must consider the research available to guide practice and therapists' education level. Facility size and location (rural, urban) do not affect perceived research use.
In conclusion, the shortage of doctors can be described as a pincer movement. The German medical profession is both superannuated and faces difficulty recruiting new young doctors. The shortage of doctors in Germany is thus not caused by a mass exodus of those already working in the system but by the reluctance of young doctors to work in curative medicine. This shortage of doctors is already apparent in the statistics. Last year the number of doctors active in ambulatory medicine dropped in the areas of four State Medical Associations (Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt). Moreover, in Saxony-Anhalt the number of the hospital doctors also declined so that this state was faced with a 1.1% fall in the number of working doctors. The Saarland also recorded a fall in the number of active hospital doctors. The conclusion must be that the standard conditions for doctors must be made more attractive so that young people take more interest in curative medicine. If this does not happen, there will be bottlenecks in the supply of medical care on a broad front in Germany. In the end, the provision of medical care for the population as a whole could be jeopardised.
Destructive periodontal diseases have been associated with increased risk of atherosclerotic complications, including myocardial infarction (MI) and stroke. This finding comes at a time when our understanding of atherosclerotic complications are changing from a focus on the occlusion of arteries, due to the buildup of plaque deposits, to an increased awareness of the role of inflammation in plaque rupture and thrombus formation. The role of inflammation can have great significance to the dental profession if inflammatory cells and factors derived from chronic infections, such as destructive periodontal diseases, are shown to contribute to plaque rupture. This "Perspectives" feature will review the role of inflammation in atherosclerotic complications, and the association between destructive periodontal diseases, systemic inflammation and atherosclerotic complications. It will also highlight ongoing research designed to determine whether destructive periodontal diseases contribute to atherosclerotic complications.
We aimed to identify why female students in Qatar decide to become nurses and how the students perceived the community attitude towards nursing. A self-administered anonymous questionnaire was distributed to all (57) female students of the four academic classes of the Nursing Unit, University of Qatar for the academic year 1999-2000. The two commonest reasons for joining the nursing profession were an interest in medical services and the humanitarian nature of nursing. There were 33 (57.89%) students who considered there was a negative community attitude towards nursing mainly due to the presence of male patients and colleagues and the working hours. A mass media campaign and govemmental support were two strategies suggested to change this.
The oral health education system is in need of major reform! This is especially apparent in university-based education for the health professions. So-called preclinical as well as clinical education simply has not kept pace with or been responsive enough to shifting patient demographics and patient/population desires and expectations, changing health system expectations, evolving interdisciplinary expertise and practice requirements, new scientific discoveries and scientific information, focus on quality improvement, and/or integration of emerging technologies. Moreover, university-based "dental education" is the most costly professional degree education within the entire university portfolio, and dental student accumulated debt is increasing each year well beyond national inflation estimates. Today, we have an enormous opportunity to explore major reforms in health professional education. Through the Santa Fe "process" of open and candid engagements and discussions (see www.santafegroup.org), we advance an argument as well as a national strategy that can enable major reforms in the oral health education system. We further suggest that major revisions can result in an outcome-based education system that prepares oral health professionals to meet both the needs of patients/families/communities and the requirements of a changing health system.
BACKGROUND: Some professional categories are at risk for burnout due to job-related stressors. Burnout is characterized by physical and emotional exhaustion, apathy, cynical attitude, low personal accomplishment and reduced self-control. Several studies on occupational stress have demonstrated that burnout has a strong impact on certain professions and in particular on teachers. OBJECTIVES: The purpose of the study was to highlight and compare differences among clinical disorders diagnosed in four different classes of workers in the Public Administration sector, with particular focus on job-related and mental disorders. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Based on the data collected in 3,447 medical examinations, performed by the Milan Health District from January 1992 to December 2003, in order to assess work fitness, researchers compared four categories of state employees (teachers, clerks, health care professionals and blue collars). RESULTS: The findings revealed that the risk of teachers to develop psychiatric disorders is 2-, 2.5-, and 3-fold higher than that of clerks, health care professionals and blue collars, respectively. Age or sex did not represent a confounding factor for increased rate of psychiatric disorders. Interestingly, teachers also presented an approximately 1.5-2 fold higher risk of developing neoplasms, compared with clerks and blue collars. CONCLUSIONS: The increased prevalence of psychiatric disorders among teachers that was detected in this cohort of state employees applying for a disability pension is striking and warrants further investigation. This finding points to the need for job-related interventions aimed at preventing teachers' psychiatric disorders, a multidimensional issue which requires active debate among institutions, unions, school authorities, the scientific community, professional associations and, last but not least, students and their families.
Hans Neuffer had a well established, civil familiary background. He was raised according to Christian values and remained a practising Christian until the end of his life. Before 1945 he was no person in public life. In spite of the fact that he disapproved the Nazi rule, he did not practise open resistance. After World War Two politically guiltless physicians were needed. Neuffer had this quality and on top of that he had a talent for organisation. In the beginning he was medical functionary in his swabian hometown Stuttgart. In 1949 he took over tasks as medical functionary nationwide. Under his leadership the German physicians succeeded in creating the structures of self administration, that still exist today. Big improvements in income were achieved. The German physicians profited from this until the seventy years of the last century. In addition to this the German doctors managed to become fully accepted members of the World Medical Association (WMA). Besides his work as medical functionary, Neuffer was occupied with ethical questions. The premise of Neuffer's medical ethics were the physician's close ties to God. The responsibility to God was more important than responsibility to conscience, science, the people or the government. One of the foundations of Neuffer's ethics lies in the doctor's personality. Like an artist the "true" physician felt an inner calling. He possessed high mental capacity and had special psychological abilities. Such high moral, mental and psychological demands could only be fulfilled in freedom. Freedom required an adequate income and physicians' self administration. This kind of medical ethics fitted well to the political aims of West Germany's General Medical Council. The freedom of the medical profession and independence from society or government were crucial positions. Hans Neuffer was a politically and morally guiltless medical functionary. At the end of his presidency in 1959, West Germany's physicians had achieved all important aims of their political program.