Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was once largely a hospital-acquired infection, but increasingly, community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA) is causing outbreaks among otherwise healthy people in athletic settings. Secondary school athletic trainers, student athletes, and the general student population may be at elevated risk of MRSA infection. To identify the prevalence of MRSA on ...

One’s athletic identity, developed and maintained by others as well as the self, is likely important in sustaining long-term physical activity over many years. The 21-item Athletic Identity Questionnaire (AIQ) is presented as a multidimensional measure of the components of athletic identity that reflects an attribute all people possess to varying degrees and encompasses exercise, sports, and ph...

Few collegiate athletes advance to the ranks of professional. For most collegiate student-athletes, their retirement from athletics will begin soon after their senior campaign, but many have a difficult time leaving their dreams, aspirations, and athletic identity behind. Athletes participating in high-level sports competition have been noted to have an exclusive athletic identity, with most of...

Scrotal rupture during athletic competition is considered a rare occurrence; however, blunt trauma to the scrotum is relatively common. Protective athletic cups are strongly recommended for both children and adults engaging in contact sports as they likely limit the amount of serious injury to the scrotal contents. Nonetheless, should the on-field assessment by the athletic trainer, coach, or t...

INTRODUCTION The German healthcare system is facing ongoing radical change and development. The increasing tendency to urge hospitals and medical staff to work in a profit-oriented way constitute among other factors clear present and future challenges. Physicians and surgeons in particular increasingly complain of increasing stress attributed to measures aiming at cost reduction in hospitals. T...

BACKGROUND High performing hospitals attain excellence across multiple measures of performance and multiple departments. Studying high performing hospitals can be valuable if factors associated with high performance can be identified and applied. Factors leading to high performance are complex and an exclusive quantitative approach may fail to identify richly descriptive or relevant contextual ...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have identified medication errors in preparing and administering intravenous medicines of 13-84% in hospitals in individual countries. OBJECTIVE To compare the effect of the design and implementation of systems for the preparation and administration of intravenous therapy in hospitals in three European countries on the number of observed medication errors. To gain ...

Studies of hospital efficiency seldom lead to changes in practice, partly because recommendations are unspecific or results are not seen as robust. We describe a method to compare hospital costs that utilises patient-level data. We perform a two-stage analysis in which we first consider factors that explain costs among patients and then across hospital departments. We illustrate our approach by...

PURPOSE The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine developmental trends in healthcare organisation management practice and improvement work. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH Primary healthcare centre (n = 1,031) and clinical hospital department (n = 1,542) managers were surveyed in spring 2007 (response rate 46 per cent). This article compares results from this survey with a study in 2003...