The PSP complements the financial incentive payments with practice support and clinical tools for difficult patient populations such as patients with mental health disorders, and those requiring end of life care.
Adolescents are a difficult population to access for preventive health care, particularly in less resourced countries.
Board members are a difficult population to reach for research purposes, both because they tend to be busy people and because of the confidential nature of boardroom discussions.
However, in our experience this is a difficult population to access for qualitative interviews as patients who are early in treatment can be reluctant to talk about their experiences.
That said, this is a difficult population to recruit for MRI scanning and although our number compares favorably to the existing literature, a MRI follow-up study with greater statistical power may help decipher negative findings.
Since 5 days on/2 days off intermittent therapy has been shown to be as least as effective as continuous therapy, this strategy could have particular importance for programs of directly observed therapy (DOT) for difficult to treat populations including children and adolescents attending school 5 days a week.
Authoritarian attitudes and overconfidence in their own capabilities then substitutes for difficult negotiations with a population that does not think according to the technocratic referral paradigms of division of labour and hierarchy of competence and skills.
Of interest, a recent but unpublished study has highlighted that the female gender was a predictor for difficult LMA placement in a study population of more than 400 patients, where LMA placement was performed by a single skilled clinician.
This effect is unfortunate given that the ability to genotype more markers is fast increasing while sampling many individuals can be difficult for populations of conservation concern.
Although it may be difficult for populations to reduce total fat intake, attempts should be made to do so, to help control weight, where mean total fat intake is 30% or more of energy.
