14 Indeed some outcomes further down the pathway of outcomes may be the most economically beneficial, for example, diabetes education programmes reduce smoking rates which cause longer term reductions in cardiovascular risk.
Despite widespread acceptance of critical pathways for surgical procedures, there has been relatively little rigorous evaluation of the effectiveness of these critical pathways on outcomes [ 3- 6].
Therefore, not only do they study the relationship between SES and health, poverty and healthy behaviors, but these theories seek an explanation for causal pathways of oral health outcomes, risk behaviors and use of oral health services [ 7, 8].
The Adverse Outcome Pathways (AOPs) are designed to provide mechanistic understanding of complex biological systems and pathways of toxicity that result in adverse outcomes (AOs) relevant to regulatory endpoints.
Clinical audit is a tool designed to improve the quality of patient care, experience and outcome through formal review of systems, pathways and outcome of care against defined standards, and the implementation of change based on the results.
Our approach of using mixed methods corroborates the work of Peters et al. (55), which describes it as a practical way to understand multiple perspectives, causal pathways, and outcomes of implementation research.
The retrospective study utilised a survey and chart audit exploring existing health service pathways of management, referrals and outcomes during the twelve months prior to enrolment in the study.
The epidemiology, outcomes, pathways of care, predictors for prognosis and service needs for primary care patients with depressive disorders will be described and recommendations made for policy and service planning.
Influenza can precipitate or exacerbate other respiratory and circulatory conditions, and there is a wide spectrum of clinical pathways and outcomes for influenza-associated conditions and complications.
The conceptual framework for studying the relationships between user (child and family) and system characteristics, primary healthcare utilisation (healthcare pathways), and outcomes (appropriateness of referral to a specialised orthopaedic clinic) is derived from Andersen's Behavioral Model of Health Services Use [ 23– 25] and is presented in Fig. 1.
