(Press-News.org) Parents who had established relationships with pediatricians still accessed care for their children at retail clinics (RCs), typically located in large chain drugstores, mostly because the clinics were convenient, according to a study published by JAMA Pediatrics, a JAMA Network publication.
Most RCs are staffed by nonpediatric nurse practitioners and physician assistants who care for patients 18 months and older with minor illnesses such as ear and throat infections. However, the literature regarding RCs is limited and little is known about the use of RCs for pediatric care, according to the study background.
Jane M. Garbutt, M.B., Ch.B., of Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, and colleagues sought to determine reasons parents with established relationships with pediatricians used RCs for care for their children.
The study at 19 pediatric practices in a Midwestern practice-based research network included 1,484 parents (a 91.9 percent response rate) who completed a survey.
Of the 344 parents (23.2 percent) who had used RCs for their children, 74 percent first considered going to the pediatrician, but reported choosing an RC because the RC had more convenient hours (36.6 percent), no office appointment was available (25.2 percent), they did not want to bother their pediatrician after hours (15.4 percent) or they thought the problem was not serious enough (13 percent). Visits (n=344) to RCs were most commonly for acute upper respiratory tract illnesses (sore throat, 34.3 percent; ear infection, 26.2 percent; and colds or flu, 19.2 percent), according to the study results.
"Many parents with established relationships with a pediatrician use RCs for themselves and for their children, with some repeatedly choosing the RC instead of an office visit. These parents believe RCs provide better access to timely care at hours convenient to the family's schedule," the study concludes. "Pediatricians can address concerns about quality of care, duplication of services and disrupted care coordination by working to optimize communication with the RCs themselves, as well as with their patients regarding appropriate management of acute minor illnesses and the role of RCs. They also will need to directly address parents' need for convenient access to care."
###
(JAMA Pediatr. Published online July 22, 2013. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2013.352. Available pre-embargo to the media at http://media.jamanetwork.com.)
Editor's Note: This study was supported by a grant from the National Center for Research Resources, a component of the National Institutes of Health, and a National Institutes of Health Roadmap for Medical Research. Please see the articles for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.
Editorial: Public Preferences, Professional Choices on Retail-Based Clinics
In an editorial, Edward L. Schor, M.D., of the Lucille Packard Foundation for Children's Health, Palo Alto, Calif., writes: "In this issue of JAMA Pediatrics, Garbutt and colleagues try to understand and reconcile parents' use of highly accessible and low-cost retail-based clinics (RBCs) for their children with the position of the American Academy of Pediatrics that children's care should occur in their medical home."
"Pediatricians seem to be taking the threat of RBCs with a grain of salt," Schor continues.
"Retail-based clinics reflect systemic changes occurring within the health care industry to which pediatric practices must adapt," Schor concludes.
(JAMA Pediatr. Published online July 22, 2013. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2013.359. Available pre-embargo to the media at http://media.jamanetwork.com.)
Editor's Note: Please see the articles for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.
Parents' experiences with pediatric retail clinics examined
2013-07-23
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Vascular complications of fungal meningitis after contaminated spinal injections
2013-07-23
A case series by researchers at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., examined three patients with ischemic stroke who later received a diagnosis of fungal meningitis attributed to epidural injections of contaminated methylprednisolone for low back pain.
The recent identification of injections of contaminated methylprednisolone acetate has highlighted the different clinical presentations of fungal meningitis, which can have an incubation period of one to four weeks between the last spinal injection and when a patient seeks medical care.
"Fungal meningitis due to ...
Chips that mimic the brain
2013-07-23
No computer works as efficiently as the human brain – so much so that building an artificial brain is the goal of many scientists. Neuroinformatics researchers from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich have now made a breakthrough in this direction by understanding how to configure so-called neuromorphic chips to imitate the brain's information processing abilities in real-time. They demonstrated this by building an artificial sensory processing system that exhibits cognitive abilities.
New approach: simulating biological neurons
Most approaches in neuroinformatics ...
Scientists identify key to learning new words
2013-07-23
For the first time scientists have identified how a pathway in the brain which is unique to humans allows us to learn new words.
The average adult's vocabulary consists of about 30,000 words. This ability seems unique to humans as even the species closest to us -- chimps -- manage to learn no more than 100.
It has long been believed that language learning depends on the integration of hearing and repeating words but the neural mechanisms behind learning new words remained unclear. Previous studies have shown that this may be related to a pathway in the brain only ...
Learning a language depends on good connection between regions of the left hemisphere of the brain
2013-07-23
Language is a uniquely human ability. The average person's vocabulary consists of about thirty thousand words, although there are individual differences in the ability to learn a new language. It has long been believed that language acquisition depends on the integration of the information between motor and auditory representation of words in the brain, but the neural mechanisms that lie behind learning new words remained unclear.
Now, a study made by researchers from the group of Cognition and Brain Plasticity at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) ...
BMC surgeon recommends off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting be abandoned
2013-07-23
(Boston) - In a Special Report in the current issue of Circulation, Boston Medical Center cardiothoracic surgeon Harold Lazar, MD, has found that off-pump coronary artery bypass graft (OPCAB) surgery has failed to show any significant improvement in short-term morbidity or mortality as compared to the traditional on-pump coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. He recommends that the technique be abandoned, unless surgeons who perform off-pump surgery can show that their own results are as good as results reported with the traditional on-pump surgery.
During off-pump ...
Geochemical 'fingerprints' leave evidence that megafloods eroded steep gorge
2013-07-23
The Yarlung-Tsangpo River in southern Asia drops rapidly through the Himalaya Mountains on its way to the Bay of Bengal, losing about 7,000 feet of elevation through the precipitously steep Tsangpo Gorge.
For the first time, scientists have direct geochemical evidence that the 150-mile long gorge, possibly the world's deepest, was the conduit by which megafloods from glacial lakes, perhaps half the volume of Lake Erie, drained suddenly and catastrophically through the Himalayas when their ice dams failed at times during the last 2 million years.
"You would expect that ...
Off-grid sterilization with Rice U.'s 'solar steam'
2013-07-23
HOUSTON – (July 22, 2013) – Rice University nanotechnology researchers have unveiled a solar-powered sterilization system that could be a boon for more than 2.5 billion people who lack adequate sanitation. The "solar steam" sterilization system uses nanomaterials to convert as much as 80 percent of the energy in sunlight into germ-killing heat.
The technology is described online in a July 8 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition. In the paper, researchers from Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) show two ways that solar steam ...
Fires in Eastern Russian and Siberia
2013-07-23
Forest fires are burning north and east of Russia's Irkutsk Oblast. The Irkutsk Oblast is located in southeastern Siberia in the basins of Angara, Lena, and Nizhnyaya Tunguska Rivers.
NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the area and captured an image showing multiple forest fires and smoke plumes. Some of the places affected by the smoke include Cokhchuolu, Ust'ye-Chony, Skysykatakh, and Chernyshevskiy along the Vilyuy River. These appear to be recreational areas.
South of the Vilyuy River is the town of Mirny. It is known for having the world's largest diamond mine. ...
Fires in Idaho
2013-07-23
Forest fires continue to plague the hot, dry western part of the United States this summer. In Idaho, several fires were spotted by NASA's Aqua satellite on July 20, 2013. Actively burning areas, detected by MODIS's thermal bands, are outlined in red.
The Lodgepole Fire was detected at noon on Saturday, July 20. Local fire resources were dispatched to the scene where aggressive fire suppression efforts were put into place. The fire is currently burning in lodge pole pine and dispersed Douglas fir. Currently 650 acres have burned and the cause of this fire is under investigation.
The ...
Land-clearing Blazes in Indonesia
2013-07-23
In Indonesia, land-clearing blazes dot the countryside. Fires for clearing land have been outlowed for all but the smallest landowners, but the "slash-and-burn" practice still persists despite cloaking Southeast Asia in toxic pollution for weeks. Better and more available satellite technology is helping identify culprits behind land-clearing blazes in Indonesia. Unprecedented levels of air pollution in Singapore and Malaysia in June led to respiratory illnesses, school closings, and grounded aircraft. This year it was so bad that in some affected areas there was a 100 ...