Recent Articles
Effective symptom identification, a key responsibility for community pharmacists, requires patients to describe their symptoms accurately and comprehensively. However, current practices in pharmacies may be insufficient in capturing patient-reported symptoms comprehensively, potentially affecting the quality of pharmaceutical care and patient safety.
The social media platform YouTube is a recognized educational resource for health information, but few studies have explored its value for conveying the lived experience of individuals managing chronic health conditions and end users’ interactions with medical device technology. Our study explores self-care strategies and end user needs of people living with a stoma because patient education and engagement in ostomy self-care are essential for avoiding ostomy-related complications. Ostomy surgery creates a stoma (an opening) in the abdomen to alter the route of excreta from digestive and urinary organs into a detachable external pouching system. After hospital discharge, people who have undergone ostomies perform critical self-care tasks including frequent ostomy appliance changes and stomal and peristomal skin maintenance.
Given the global burden of insufficient physical activity (PA) in children, effective behavioral interventions are needed to increase PA levels. Novel technologies can help expand the reach and accessibility of these programs. Despite the potential to use heart rate (HR) to target moderate- to vigorous-intensity PA (MVPA), most HR research to date has focused on the accuracy of HR devices or used HR for PA surveillance rather than as an intervention tool. Furthermore, most commercial HR sensors are designed for adults, and their suitability for children is unknown. Further research about the feasibility and usability of commercial HR devices is required to understand how children may use HR during PA.
As technology is integrated into health care delivery, research on adoption and acceptance of health technologies leaves large gaps in practice and provides limited explanation of how and why certain technologies are adopted and others are not. In these discussions, the concept of legitimacy is omnipresent but often implicit and underdeveloped. There is no agreement about what legitimacy is or how it works across social science disciplines, despite a prolific volume of the literature centering legitimacy.
Patient-derived biospecimens are invaluable tools in biomedical research. Currently, there are no mechanisms for patients to follow along and learn about the uses of their donated samples. Incorporating patients as stakeholders and meaningfully engaging them in biomedical research first requires transparency of research activities.
Antimicrobial resistances pose significant challenges in healthcare systems. Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) represent a potential strategy for promoting a more targeted and guideline-based use of antibiotics. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into these systems has the potential to support physicians in selecting the most effective drug therapy for a given patient.
First Nations children and youth may have unique ways to convey their health needs that have not been recognized by health providers. This may contribute to the disparity between high rates of mental health and physical pain and the low rates of treatment for the conditions they experience. Evidence suggests a colonial history has resulted in poor experiences with the healthcare system, lack of trust with health providers and miscommunication between clinicians and patients. Contemporary ways using both Indigenous and Western knowledge is needed to bridge the gap in communicating pain.
Digital self-monitoring tools, such as the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), enable individuals to collect detailed information about their mental health and daily life context and may help guide and support person-centered mental healthcare. However, like many digital interventions, ESM struggles to move from research to clinical integration. To guide the implementation of self-monitoring tools in mental healthcare, it is important to understand why and how clinicians and clients adopted, adapted, and incorporated these tools in practice.
Long COVID is an often-debilitating condition affecting millions of people. Its diverse clinical presentations make effective diagnosis and management at the primary care level difficult, while specialist services for long-COVID face extensive wait times. An electronic consultation (eConsult) program in Ontario developed a long COVID specialist group to allow primary care providers (PCPs) prompt access to specialist advice for patients with long COVID.
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