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Challenges in evaluating primary health care for teenagers
Author(s) -
Jacobson Lionel D.,
Matthews Sarah J.,
Robling Michael R.,
Donovan Chris,
Mellanby A.,
Donovan C.,
ParryLangdon N.,
Kramer T.
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
journal of evaluation in clinical practice
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.737
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1365-2753
pISSN - 1356-1294
DOI - 10.1046/j.1365-2753.1998.00002.x
Subject(s) - health care , government (linguistics) , teenage pregnancy , primary care , nursing , medicine , adolescent health , service (business) , population , psychology , family medicine , environmental health , business , political science , philosophy , linguistics , marketing , law
This paper concerns the evaluation of health care for teenagers and examines the role of primary care and its interaction with the teenage users of this service. It recognizes that the majority of health care for teenagers takes place within general practice. The challenge posed is to identify and put in place suitable evaluation tools. There are government targets to improve the health of teenagers by reducing teenage pregnancy, drug use, smoking rates and suicides. It is an assumption of this paper that improvements in experiences of primary care will lead to improvements in more population‐based outcomes of care, although this link needs investigation. The paper shows that there are few measures of generic outcome which are available for use in experiments to assess teenage health care as a baseline now. This has implications for conducting future research projects. Such measures are important and it is a necessary feature of research into teenage health that these measures are devised, tested and validated as a priority.