Introduction Heart failure is the most common cause of hospital admission in patients >65 years and around 50% of patients will be readmitted within 6 months. Inability to achieve timely outpatient follow-up may contribute to the high rates of avoidable rehospitalisation for this group of patients. Canadian guidelines recommend patients with heart failure should be seen within 14 days of discha...

Current medical practice is largely disease and problem focused, concentrating on the diagnosis and treatment of anatomic or physiologic problems. This approach assumes that physiologic parameters accurately reflect the patient’s status of health. It also assumes that, when a patient’s disease is ameliorated, his or her quality of life will improve. Many health services researchers find these p...

BACKGROUND Congestive heart failure is the most common indication for admission to the hospital among older adults. Behavioral factors, such as poor compliance with treatment, frequently contribute to exacerbations of heart failure, a fact suggesting that many admissions could be prevented. METHODS We conducted a prospective, randomized trial of the effect of a nurse-directed, multidisciplina...

Service development is guided by outcome measures that inform service commissioners and providers. Those in liaison psychiatry should be encouraged to develop a positive approach that integrates the collection of outcome measures into everyday clinical practice. The Framework for Routine Outcome Measurement in Liaison Psychiatry (FROM-LP) is a very useful tool to measure service quality and cli...

General health as well as disease- or condition-specific outcome measures have long been used to assess patients with shoulder conditions. Currently, a variety of validated measures is available. Shoulder outcomes measures may be general (eg, American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons; Constant; Disabilities of the Arm, Shoulder, and Hand), disease-specific (eg, Rotator Cuff Quality of Life, Western ...

The inclusion of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) as an outcome measure in cystic fibrosis (CF) clinical trials can supply important patient-reported information not captured by other endpoints. Both an appropriate HRQoL measure and sound methodology are required in order to draw valid inferences about treatments and HRQoL. This paper provides the current consensus of the HRQoL Outcomes G...

objectives: the main purpose of this research was to study and contribute to an accurate test of spastic limb. the intra, inter rater reliability of the test was examined. methods: the present study was carried out in two parts in the first part of the study, the modified ashworth scale with intermediate scores (asis) was studied. during the second part of the study the intra, inter rater relia...

In the design of a randomized clinical trial with one pre and multiple post randomized assessments of the outcome variable, one needs to account for the repeated measures in determining the appropriate sample size. Unfortunately, one seldom has a good estimate of the variance of the outcome measure, let alone the correlations among the measurements over time. We show how sample sizes can be cal...