At present general practitioners lack a tool for defining the level of disability of individual patients and groups of patients with arthritis. An assessment technique (health assessment questionnaire) developed in the United States is described,' and its use in general practice evaluated. Sixty two patients agreed to be visited at home to compare their observed abilities when performing the tasks of the health assessment questionnaire. The health assessment questionnaire (HAQ) is easily understood and takes patients only 10-15 minutes to complete. The numerical scores (range 0-3) for disability obtained on the postal questionnaire are close to the observed scores when patients are visited at home.
An age-sex register is thought to be a good thing by many general practitioners'; despite this half of those surveyed recently did not have one and most of these had no plans to establish one.2 This seems surprising when information technology that will make a list of patients arranged according to age and sex is available to all general practitioners and family practitioner committees (health boards in Scotland).3 These computerised age-sex registers are easy to create and maintain with regular-for example-quarterlyupdates to ensure accuracy and concordance between the information held by general practitioners and by family practitioner committees or health boards.Ifprovided with an age-sex register most general practitioners see its advantages. Some ofits uses are in (1) patient administration, for assessing capitation fees and eligibility for services (particularly in a practice with a mobile population, for the receptionist can quickly find out if a patient who presents to the surgery is registered); (2) monitoring changes in list size and structure, which can help in practice administration; (3) identifying groups by age and sex, which is important for screening and immunisation programmes and in the running ofwell woman clinics; (4) providing a morbidity register for diseases such as diabetes and hypertension; (5) providing an "at risk" register for patients with social problems, who smoke, or who are receiving long term treatments; and (6) teaching, in listing patients who are willing to see students. As it is unlikely that computerised systems will be universally available in the next few years how might general practitioners create and maintain their own age-sex register?Registers were first described in 1963 in Britain,4 and a wide
which their own assays may give incorrect results for exogenous digoxin levels to ensure that inappropriate interpretation and action do not occur.
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