Can general practitioners influence the nation's health through a population approach to the provision of lifestyle advice?

BACKGROUND: Lifestyle advice from general practitioners (GPs) has been shown to have a positive effect on population health. In practice, GPs provide lifestyle advice to a minority of their patients only, those who are high risk or already have symptoms. AIM: To look in depth at GPs' attitudes towards adopting a population approach to lifestyle advice and to use these results to identify ways of maximising the potential of GPs to affect population health. METHOD: Thirty-six GPs, purposively sampled by identifying characteristics likely to affect their health promotion activity, participated in a focus group study. Data from the focus groups were transcribed verbatim and analysed using standard methods. RESULTS: The main themes that emerged suggested that GPs do not take a population approach to lifestyle advice because they prefer a high risk approach and doubt their ability to be effective in a population approach. GPs believed that social, cultural, and environmental factors were the most important determinants of population health. Furthermore, they were concerned about the detrimental effects on the doctor-patient relationship of providing lifestyle advice to all patients. GPs believed that a multi-agency, centrally co-ordinated approach was the preferred way to improve population health and that their role should be limited to secondary prevention. CONCLUSION: Large amounts of resources would be necessary to convince GPs to adopt a population approach to lifestyle advice. Measures to tackle the social and environmental determinants of health may be a more effective and efficient means of improving the nation's health

Teaching Effectiveness: Integrating the Adjunct Campus, The Military Student and the Host Community

This is a presentation dealing with integrating Embry-Riddle\u27s adjunct campus, the transient active-duty military student and a host community through the use of MAS 640, Supply and Distribution in the Aviation/ Aerospace Industry. A traditional problem for programs such as Embry-Riddle\u27s adjunct campus program is visibility in the local host community. This is the same problem many military members face as they move from base to base throughout their military career. This can be an unfortunate situation as all three participants in the process have much to offer and without a process to integrate them they may never become aware of the contributions each can make. One way to develop an integration process is through the use of MAS 640, Supply and Distribution in the Aviation/ Aerospace Industry. MAS 640 is designed to study the elements of physical distribution that include the structure of supply organizations, priority systems, cost categories, inventory control, and the applications of electronic data processing. Case studies are employed to present issues, problems, and analyses of supply systems in terms of customer satisfaction relative to costs incurred

E-tailers versus Retailers: Which Factors Determine Consumer Preferences

The growth of Internet technology and electronic commerce has not been matched by theoretically-guided social science research. Clear and well designed consumer research is needed to describe, explain, and predict what will happen to this changing landscape. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the structure for consumer preferences to make product purchases through three available retail formats - store, catalog, and the Internet. Conjoint analysis was used to assess the structure of the decision and the importance of the attributes in the decision-making process. The results from this study noticeably show that the structure of the consumer decision-making process was found to be primarily one of choosing the retail format (store, catalog, or Internet) and price of product (set at low, medium or high) desired. The strength of the retail store format suggests that fears that the Internet will take over the retail arena seem, at least at this point in time, overblown and exaggerated. However, there seems to be an identifiable segment of customers that has a preference for the Internet as a retail shopping alternative.Economics ;

Increasing population levels of physical activity through primary care: GPs' knowledge, attitudes and self-reported practice

Background. GPs have the potential to increase population levels of activity and thus produce important health gains. Objectives and methods. The aim of this questionnaire survey was to determine the knowledge, attitudes and self-reported practice of GPs towards promoting regular physical activity and to assess the likely impact of GPs on population levels of physical activity. Results and conclusions. A high response rate to the questionnaire was obtained and the results suggest that GPs have a good level of knowledge of the health benefits of regular physical activity and the levels required to achieve these, but do not promote activity in a way that will have an impact on the population level. Keywords. General practice, health promotion, physical activity, population approach

Paper Session I-A - Use of Neural Networks as a Range Safety Decision Support System

Current range safety processing and display systems are generally limited to presenting the Range Safety Officer with a display of flight vehicle position, impact, and performance data in conjunction with off-nominal performance destruct criteria. The decision to take any flight termination action, based on the presented data, is primarily left to the Range Safety Officer. While still maintaining the man-in-the-loop concept, neural network based artificial intelligence systems could be employed as Decision Support Systems (DSS) to assist the decision making process of the Range Safety Officer. The adaptive nature of a neural network allows it to learn from the data it is presented with and, over time, become an increasingly intelligent DSS. This paper describes ENSCO, lncorporated\u27s investigation of where and how neural networks could be employed as real-time DSS tools in the range safety decision making process. This paper will detail an ENSCO, Inc. investigation of how a neural network approach can be a viable asset to the range safety decision making process. The use of neural networks as tools to increase public safety is a feasible methodology that should be further investigated as a potential way ahead for future range safety technology programs at spaceports and launch ranges