Search

The article examines abstracts of papers submitted but not included in the program of the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, Medical Care Section, 1962. Some of these are "Experiences and Activities at a Medical Computing Center," by L.D. Cady, M.A. Woodbury, and L.J. Tich and "An Internist's Experiences With Medical Care of Welfare Patients in Proprietary Nursing Homes," by Sidney M. Greenberg. The first abstract focuses on the center that is cooperating with investigators in the area of mathematical and theoretical analysis and statistical data handling and analysis, information coding, keypunching and storage of medical data for further study and retrieval. The second abstract contains observations of the medical, nursing, and administrative practices in four nursing homes as made by an internist responsible for the medical Scare of welfare patients in these homes. In evaluating these activities the recognition and meeting of the patient's total needs was utilized as the criterion of quality of performance.

The main purpose of this article is to draw special attention to ideas developed, questions raised, and opinions expressed by some working scholars invited to present research papers on teaching the social sciences in medical schools at the 1959 meetings of the Society for Applied Anthropology held in Madison, Wisconsin. These research papers advance ideas about research and teaching that can add new dimensions to the management of conditions having obvious psychosocial components: alcoholism, hypertension, mental illness, chronic complaints of unclear etiology and so on. By training, and because of his recent advent to the medical area, the social scientist is uniquely qualified to seek to apply the "stress" theory of illness to these complaints. Another area of concern relates to social science in patient management. Nurses, social welfare workers and psychologists, as well as some medical sociologists, already participate in some aspects of patient management. There are many obstacles to the successful integration of social or behavioral science in the medical curriculum.

This paper examines the internal and external stresses which accompany the gradual shift of responsibility from local boards of health to a possible eventual domination by the state health department. Fifty seven members of boards of health in 14 communities in one county in Eastern Pennsylvania were interviewed on the present functions of the local boards of health. Our finding suggests that the local board of health is not simply an organization. It is symbolic of a way of life in a community and it represents many things-a part of town, individualism, self-rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the health insurance movement, the provision of drugs has been one of the medical needs least well met. One prepaid medical care plan has pioneered in an effort to meet this need, and its precise experience is reported in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many scientific investigations, it is desired to bring together, or link, two or more documents which represent the same individual, even though these documents do not contain a unique identifier and were derived from different sources. In medical and public health research and elsewhere, this problem is known as the document linkage problem. This paper considers some aspects of classifying pairs of documents into one of two populations when their items are identifying information, where each item of information can take on three distinct values correct, incorrect or missing. Section I identifies three document linkage problems. Sections 2 and 3 deal with the mathematical formulation of the multivariate document linkage problem. Section 4 gives the classification procedure and Section 5 deals with the application of the theory to a problem in the field of public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data are available to study the variation in mortality in this country occurring month by month for fully six decades. Death rates by month have been computed and published for the expanding death-registration area of the United States of 1900-1932 and for the complete nation (48 States and ultimately 50 States) from 1933 to the present. Even a cursory glance at the available data leads to the obvious conclusion that a definite pattern of seasonal variation of deaths exists. This seasonal swing is characterized by a high death rate in the early part of the year dropping to a trough in the summer months, and rising again during the latter part of the year. The general pattern is well recognized, as are similar seasonal curves for various causes of death. Despite the apparent wealth of statistical material at hand relatively little analytical matter has been produced in this country measuring seasonality of mortality as compared with the wide range of data compiled for statistical series portraying the nation's economic operations. Yet seasonal variation is receiving increasing attention in the evaluation of statistics of vital events. The very factors which make seasonal indices so valuable to economists and analysts also have proved to be of service to demographers and public health researchers. Seasonal adjustments provide refined information about current trends; they separate the seasonal components of statistical data from cyclical and irregular fluctuations; they provide indices with which to measure the significance of month to month change. Seasonal variation in the crude birth rate has been analyzed for the period 1933-40 using the link relative method [1]. Seasonal indices for 1948-54 were prepared with the aid of Univac, the high-speed electronic computer of the United States Bureau of the Census, using an adaptation of the standard ratio to moving average method [2]. The indices prepared by the Bureau of the Census became the basis for the regular computation of seasonally adjusted figures of births by the National Vital Statistics Division, U. S. Public Health Service 131. Similarly, marriage data published by the National Vital Statistics Division have been "deseasonalized" with the aid of methods developed by the Bureau of the Census [4]. This paper presents the results of an effort made with the assistance of Univac to eliminate seasonal variation from mortality data. Some of the particular problems encountered in adjusting mortality data, and the attempts to surmount these are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an ecological analysis of urban mortality rates in the U.S. According to the authors much of the work taking account of the health factors has been done in a comparative perspective with the general conclusion being that improved health conditions and services and not pure economic factors have been the main influence in lowering mortality in the developing nations. The purpose of this paper is to examine the ecological correlates of neighborhood mortality levels in a large urban center. The focus is upon the identification of the relative contribution of demographic, environmental, and social organizational variables to the explanation of differences in urban subarea death rates. The authors take as their starting point the works of those social scientists who have clearly demonstrated the relationship of ecological phenomena to differential urban mortality. Past studies have shown the importance of a large number of specific variables in explaining differential aggregate community mortality levels. These specific variables may be grouped into three gross categories, such as demographic, environmental, and social organizational.

The paper presents articles on public health dentistry and epidemiology. Some of the articles are — "Third Party Dental Funding in Sweden," by E. Ahlberg; "DDH International Collaborative Study of Dental Manpower in Relation to Oral Health Status," by D.E. Barmes and L.K. Cohen; "The Status of the Dentist in the Hospital and the Community. Responsibility of the Hospital to Multi-Phasic Community Dental Care," by S. Epstein; "Total Dental Care for the Adolescent," by H.L. AppleWhite.

This article presents information about the book "Report of the International Study Group of the World Federation of Mental Health," vol. 2, "Mental Health and Contemporary Thought," and vol. 3, "Mental Health in the Service of the Community," edited by Kenneth Soddy and Robert H. Ahrenfeldt. In June 1961 the World Federation of Mental Health assembled a study group of twenty-four experts for an extended period of extempore discussion. The participants prepared working papers in advance of the meeting and tape recordings were made of the discussions. Using these materials two members of the Study Group have produced a three-volume report of the proceedings. In his Preface the Chairman of the Study Group seeks to anticipate criticisms from the natural science purists of such an unsystematic, unorthodox approach to problem solving. In vol. 2, social, demographic, diplomatic and military problems get some decidedly amateurish handling. About ninety pages of introduction and bibliography are common to all three volumes.

This article presents discussion related to psychoses. The reader should be reminded that the system was developed on inpatients in public mental health facilities and therefore should work most effectively with such patients. The correlates also may be applicable to outpatients from such facilities, especially if they have become outpatients after having been inpatients, which frequently is the case, or readers familiar with computerized printouts of MMPI interpretations or with skillful clinical interpretations, the interpretive summaries given in this paper may be disappointing on several grounds: Prognostic statements are not included, the reports often are brief, the language in which the reports are cast lacks elegance, scales L, F, and K are not interpreted in terms of validity, and dynamic explanations of behavior are not attempted.