Peer support, a cornerstone in recovery programs for mental illness and addiction, has not been widely applied to service programs for survivors of suicide. In 2004-2006 Canadian Mental Health Association Suicide Services in Calgary, Alberta, introduced the Peer Support Program for adults, an adjunct to conventional individual and group intervention. This article reports on a mixed-methods evaluation of the Peer Support Program. Hogan's Grief Response Checklist and the qualitative data tracked positive outcomes for both the peer supporters and the clients. This study challenges the unspoken assumption that survivors of suicide, due to their vulnerability, require the services of highly skilled professionals and would not be in a position to offer unsupervised support to peers. Rather it supports an intervention protocol that consists of peer supporters and professionals working collaboratively to offer cost-effective, client-centered services.

FPs in the CHR need to increase their comfort level toward opioids in general to adequately manage CNCP. Their lack of comfort may reflect a lack of education or fear of regulatory scrutiny.

This descriptive study explored multicultural issues in medical education which should be included in the curricula of both the undergraduate and residency programs of the Faculty of Medicine, The University of Calgary. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 21 male and female ethnic patients to determine their expectations of and experiences with the health care they had received in Canada. Telephone interviews were conducted with ten primary care physicians to determine their experiences of providing care to new immigrants from cultures other than their own. Content analyses and comparison of the two sets of interview data revealed barriers to satisfaction, diagnosis and treatment. Some barriers were perceived both by the physicians and the ethnic patients, e.g. language, and attitudes towards medical technology and treatment. Others were perceived just by the physicians, e.g. patients' belief in traditional practices. Still others were perceived just by the ethnic patient, e.g. perceived racial discrimination. Based on the data from the interviews, two simulated patients were developed and presented to the students of medicine, both undergraduate and resident, to teach them about multicultural health care. This study demonstrates how local data about multicultural health issues can be used to develop simulated patients for inclusion in the medical curriculum.

Family physicians and specialists were asked to identifjl the sources of information they used in theprocess of making changes in their clinical practices. Wile physicians identified journals, courses, pharmaceutical representatives, colleagues and consultations frequently as initial sources of information, the anticipated benefit to patient care was most Pequently identified as the final motivating factor: Socio-demographic factors including specialty status (us. family physician], age, community size, and base hospital were found to influence the information sources used by physicians to integrate advances into their clinicalpractices. An average of 3.08 sources of information were utilized for each change and over j@?y percent of the changes were complete in less than one year The authors discuss the implications of their findings for providers of continuing medical education.elays frequently occur between the time D new scientific information is disseminated and the time it is incorporated into clinical practice. Chalmers (1) found that as many as ten or fifteen years following the conduct of well controlled trials, physicians may be prescribing drugs which are contraindicated, or giving unsubstantiated advice. Stross ( 2 ) surveyed family physicians and internists to determine their knowledge of photocoagulation in diabetic retinopathy two years after results of a well constructed study were published. only 21 percent of the family physicians and 42 percent of internists correctly identified the appropriate management of two patient problems in which photocoagulation was indicated. Stross ( 2 ) asked the physicians who indicated a knowledge of photocoagulation in diabetic retinopathy to identify where they had learned of the study results. More than two-thirds indicated an ophthalmologist or a colleague and 25 percent mentioned journals. To date, only preliminary work has been done to delineate the sources of information physicians use in the adoption of medical innovations. In an early study by Coleman et al. ( 3 ) , the researchers traced the adoption of a new pharmaceutical compound by 216 physicians in four communities over a 16 month period. By the end of the study period, 85 percent of the physicians were prescribing the drug. They determined that 57 percent of the physicians first learned about it from a detail man and 33 percent brom journals or other reading material. Ninety percent of their population had received information about the drug from at least one other source before adopting it and 62 percent indicated that they had heard of the drug &om three or more sources. The final source of information was a colleague 28 percent of the time, a professional journal 21 percent of the time, and drug house literature 21 percent of the time.More recently Geertsma et al. ( 4 ) interviewed 66 physicians from five specialties and asked each physician to identify changes they had instituted in their clinical practices. They found