Richard M. Shewchuk

Health management-related journals embody the place where scholarly and professional knowledge resides. Stakeholders—academicians, universities, libraries, and publishers—harbor interest in journal evaluations such as ratings and rankings in order to make sense of these journals. Although acceptance rates and impact factors enjoy wide consensus validity and are used as evaluative measures of journal prestige, they do not provide insights into journal focus or substantive orientation. An alternative cognitive mapping approach to ascertain how health care management journals are perceived with a new assessment criterion, Career value to an author by publishing in a journal, is introduced. The data were analyzed by multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analyses, resulting in a two-dimensional, nine cluster map. Nine clusters of perceptually related journals were ordered according to perceived career value. The presented map and clusters offer a complementary framework for comprehending how journals are understood by health management scholars.

Purpose: The aim of this study is to examine patient satisfaction with non‐physician staff as related to patient demographics, satisfaction with physician, and intentions to recommend their physicians to others.Design/methodology/approach: A survey was conducted at two internal medicine primary care clinics affiliated with a major university health system. A latent class analysis was used to detect patient subpopulations based on profiles of response for five satisfaction‐with‐staff indicators.Findings: The response rate was 86.46 percent (479 of 554). Analyses revealed four patient subpopulation segments. Segment I (n=241) patients uniformly indicated a high level of satisfaction across the five satisfaction‐with‐staff indicators. These patients tended to be older and less educated, and have lower incomes relative to patients in other segments. Patients in Segment II (n=83) expressed satisfaction with staff caring and need accommodation, but dissatisfaction with access to their physicians. Patients in Segment III (n=51) indicated high levels of satisfaction with access and low levels of satisfaction with staff caring and need accommodation. Segment IV (n=104) patients uniformly expressed low levels of satisfaction across all indicators and generally were younger and more educated, as well as had higher incomes than other patients.Originality/value: Patients have different expectations from their non‐physician staff, e.g. younger, more affluent, and educated patients expressed dissatisfaction with staff. This suggests that non‐physician staff should provide extra/further responsiveness to have these patients' needs met. Generally, approaches that are differentially targeted to specific patient subgroups are likely to be more efficient and patient‐oriented than undifferentiated approaches.

Internet Delivered Support for Tobacco Control in Dental Practice: Randomized Controlled Trial

Background and methodology The diaphragm, once the most commonly used female contraceptive method, is being re-evaluated for prevention against some sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV. However, provider views about this prescription-based method are poorly understood. Using expert panels, this study aimed to identify facilitative strategies to increase diaphragm use. The nominal group technique (NGT) was employed using a novel web-based interface to systematically elicit and prioritise responses to a specific question about what can be done to encourage providers to recommend diaphragm use. Two NGT sessions were convened with 15 geographically dispersed panellists who had extensive knowledge and experience with the diaphragm. Participants were identified using purposeful and snowball sampling. Results Panel 1 identified 22 strategies for encouraging providers to recommend diaphragm use, with seven perceived as relatively more important (67% of the total available votes). Panel 2 identified 31 strategies, nine of which accounted for 77% of the votes. Both sessions highlighted that to make the diaphragm a more plausible option, educational materials and tools are needed to better inform providers and patients about the method and its specific advantages. Conclusions The enhanced, Internet-based NGT offers the family planning and reproductive health care field a powerful and inexpensive tool for systematically collecting and analysing expert opinion. Results are being used to develop a questionnaire to further examine strategies that may help promote diaphragm use and to refine ideas for intervention design. This will facilitate method reintroduction, if the diaphragm is proven effective against STIs/HIV, especially when used with a microbicide.

Confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine the appropriateness of using with elderly persons Levenson's multidimensional locus of control (LoC) scale that measures beliefs in Internal Control (I), Control by Powerful Others (P), and Chance (C). Data were obtained from elderly individuals in Florida and Texas and reformulated to allow cross-validation at each step in a series of model evaluations. Results indicated that Levenson's three-factor specification of control was not a valid representation of the samples' responses. A model that specified the elimination of eleven unreliable items and the formation of a new external control factor that was based on the remaining C and P items provided an adequate fit to the data for both samples. The failure to confirm Levenson's three-factor structure poses a construct-validity and measurement-equivalence problem when making age-based comparisons of LoC scores.