New Specialist Services Committee initiatives underway

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 52, No. 3, April 2010, Page 133 News

The Specialist Services Committee (SSC) was established to facilitate collaboration between the government, the BCMA, and the health au­thorities on the delivery of specialist services and to support the improvement of the specialist care system. The 2009 Memorandum of Agreement provides additional funding to the SSC to support this mandate. 

There is $20 million available in 2010/11 and an additional $25 million in 2011/12 for a total of $45 million in the second year.

With these funds, the SSC has agreed to implement the following new initiatives starting 1 April 2010:

• Specialist-to-physician urgent telephone advice fee.
• Specialist-to-physician telephone patient management fee.
• Specialist-to-patient telephone follow-up fee.
• Preoperative and postoperative bil­ling rule changes.
• Specialist payment for participation in health authority system redesign.
• Practice Support Program (PSP) for specialists and their MOAs.

. New Specialist Services Committee initiatives underway. BCMJ, Vol. 52, No. 3, April, 2010, Page(s) 133 - News.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

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For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

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