BACKGROUND: There is emerging consensus that enhanced inter-professional teamwork is necessary for the effective and efficient delivery of primary care, but there is less practical information specific to primary care available to guide practices on how to better work as teams. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to describe how primary care practices have overcome challenges to providing team-based primary care and the implications for care delivery and policy. APPROACH: Practices for this qualitative study were selected from those recognized as patient-centered medical homes (PCMHs) via the most recent National Committee for Quality Assurance PCMH tool, which included a domain on practice teamwork. PARTICIPANTS: Sixty-three respondents, ranging from physicians to front-desk staff, were interviewed from May through December of 2013. Practice respondents came from 27 primary care practices ranging in size, type, geography, and population served. KEY RESULTS: Practices emphasizing teamwork overcame common challenges through the incremental delegation of non-clinical tasks away from physicians. The roles of medical assistants and nurses are expanding to include template-guided information collection from patients prior to the physician office visit as well as many other tasks. The inclusion of staff input in care workflow redesign and the use of data to demonstrate how team care process changes improved patient care were helpful in gaining staff buy-in. Team "huddles" guided by pre-visit planning were reported to assist in role delegation, consistency of information collected from patients, and structured communication among team members. Nurse care managers were found to be important team members in working with patients and their physicians on care plan design and execution. Most practices had not participated in formal teamwork training, but respondents expressed a desire for training for key team members, particularly if they could access it on-site (e.g., via practice coaches or the Internet). CONCLUSIONS: Participants who adopted new forms of delegation and care processes using teamwork approaches, and who were supported with resources, system support, and data feedback, reported improved provider satisfaction and productivity. There appears to be a need for more on-site teamwork training.

Objective Consensus that enhanced teamwork is necessary for efficient and effective primary care delivery is growing. We sought to identify how electronic health records (EHRs) facilitate and pose challenges to primary care teams as well as how practices are overcoming these challenges.Methods Practices in this qualitative study were selected from those recognized as patient-centered medical homes via the National Committee for Quality Assurance 2011 tool, which included a section on practice teamwork. We interviewed 63 respondents, ranging from physicians to front-desk staff, from 27 primary care practices ranging in size, type, geography, and population size.Results EHRs were found to facilitate communication and task delegation in primary care teams through instant messaging, task management software, and the ability to create evidence-based templates for symptom-specific data collection from patients by medical assistants and nurses (which can offload work from physicians). Areas where respondents felt that electronic medical record EHR functionalities were weakest and posed challenges to teamwork included the lack of integrated care manager software and care plans in EHRs, poor practice registry functionality and interoperability, and inadequate ease of tracking patient data in the EHR over time.Discussion Practices developed solutions for some of the challenges they faced when attempting to use EHRs to support teamwork but wanted more permanent vendor and policy solutions for other challenges.Conclusions EHR vendors in the United States need to work alongside practicing primary care teams to create more clinically useful EHRs that support dynamic care plans, integrated care management software, more functional and interoperable practice registries, and greater ease of data tracking over time.

In order to address the oft-cited societal, economic, and health and social care impacts of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, we must move decisively from reactive to proactive clinical practice and to embed evidence-based brain health education throughout society. Most disease processes can be at least partially prevented, slowed, or reversed. We have long neglected to intervene in neurodegenerative disease processes, largely due to a misconception that their predominant symptom – cognitive decline – is a normal, age-related process, but also due to a lack of multi-disciplinary collaboration. We now understand that there are modifiable risk factors for neurodegenerative diseases, that successful management of common comorbidities (such as diabetes and hypertension) can reduce the incidence of neurodegenerative disease, and that disease processes begin (and, crucially, can be detected, reduced, and delayed, prevented, or treated) decades earlier in life than had previously been appreciated. Brain Health Scotland, established by Scottish Government and working in partnership with Alzheimer Scotland, propose far-reaching public health and clinical practice approaches to reduce neurodegenerative disease incidence. Focusing here on Brain Health Scotland’s clinical offerings, we present the Scottish Model for Brain Health Services. To our knowledge, the Scottish Model for Brain Health, built on foundations of personalised risk profiling, targeted risk reduction and prevention, early disease detection, equity of access, and harnessing comprehensive data to assist in clinical decision-making, marks the first example of a nationwide approach to overhauling clinical, societal, and political approaches to the prevention, assessment, and treatment of neurodegenerative disease.

Stroke is a leading cause of long-term disability. A stroke can damage areas of the brain associated with communication, resulting in speech and language disorders. Such disorders are frequently acquired impairments from left-hemispheric stroke. Music-based treatments have been implemented, and researched in practice, for the past thirty years; however, the number of published reports reviewing these treatments is limited. This paper uses the four elements of the narrative synthesis framework to investigate, scrutinise and synthesise music-based treatments used in the rehabilitation of patients with speech and language disorders. A systematic review revealed that fifteen studies meet the inclusion criteria set out. It was found that the music-based treatments utilised included: Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT), Modified Melodic Intonation Therapy (MMIT), adapted forms of MIT, the Singing Intonation, Prosody, breathing (German: Atmung), Rhythm and Improvisation (SIPARI) method and a variety of methods using singing and songs. From a synthesis of the data, three themes emerged which were key elements of the interventions; they were: (a) singing songs and vocal exercises, (b) stimulating the right hemisphere and (c) use of speech prosody. These themes are discussed and implications for newly-qualified practitioners are explored.

Bouveret's syndrome is a rare variant of gallstone ileus characterized by a gastric outlet obstruction due to the impaction of a gallstone lodged in the duodenum, resulting from a cholecystoduodenal fistula. It accounts for only one to three percent of cases of gallstone ileus. We examine a case of Bouveret syndrome in an elderly Japanese female who presented with vomiting and decreased oral intake. Subsequent imaging found a gallstone ileus due to a bilioduodenal fistula. She underwent exploratory laparotomy enterolithotomy which found a large black gallstone located in the small bowel and confirmed the presence of the fistula. Despite its relative rarity, Bouveret syndrome carries a high risk of morbidity and mortality.

The temporal inertial instabilities of the Type I Long’s vortex for large values of the flow force, M, are explored. It is found that growth rates and wave speeds obtained numerically for the exact vortex profiles agree very well with those obtained for large-M profiles found by asymptotic means. Agreement is excellent, so the large-M structure and inertial instability modes of the Type I Long’s vortex are now well established. It is determined that the modes computed here are ring modes. Both exact and asymptotic solutions display a spurious instability mode, which vanishes for increased resolution.