[Large x-ray materials--problem and challenge].

Representative samples of Finnish health centres and of their physicians, nurses and physiotherapists were selected for a comprehensive survey on the professionals' work characteristics, health education attitudes and counseling practices. The main objectives of the study were to study the degree of implementation of patient counseling, with special reference to the national goals in health policy and to analyze the determinants of counseling practices in terms of predisposing, enabling and reinforcing factors. Broadly defined patient counseling was frequent in the contacts with all 3 professional groups and no differences in counseling frequency were found between different sizes of health centres. However, the objective of implementing counseling in every patient contact, with the incorporation of guidance regarding healthy living habits in it, recommended in the national health policy goals, was only partially realized. There were distinct differences between the 3 professional groups in counseling attitudes, topics, methods and purposes. These differences reflect, to a great extent, the differences in the professional tasks and the basic training between the 3 groups and also differences in the characteristics of patient contacts. These findings indicate a need for further in-service training in the methods of patients counseling, as well as restructuring the health care delivery system to allow more time for counseling, better continuity between contacts and more co-work between the members of primary care teams.

Finland↗

PubMed1995

Estimation of quantitative genetic parameters under non-normal models.

In traditional quantitative genetics, the relationship between the observed value of a quantitative trait in a set of families and its genetic and environmental contributions can be described as a linear additive relationship. Generally, it is assumed that the genetic and environmental effects are independent and normally distributed. Consequently, the quantitative trait also has a normal distribution. However, there are some situations where the phenotype does not follow the normal distribution. To deal with this problem the author suggests the families of distributions that belong to the Johnson Translation System (JTS). As an example, two dependent quantitative traits, weight and height, are investigated assuming that they have a lognormal and normal distribution, respectively. Computational methods for estimating the genotypic variances and covariances are presented.

Finland↗