the quality of care for children and wants to eliminate these differences (the National Service Framework). 5 The framework allows adult nurses to care for children only within the limits of their knowledge and should be under direct supervision of a children’s trained nurse. Recruitment and retention of nursing staff is a problem in emergency departments. The Royal College of Nursing recommend...

Background: Suicide attempts, being considered from among psychiatric emergencies, are under the category of social and health problems that affect the individual, the family, and even the community. This study was conducted to determine people who attempted suicide referred to the emergency ward of Ali Ibn Abi Taleb hospital in the city of Rafsanjan, Iran in 2016. Materials and Methods: This ...

OBJECTIVE To review the case records of patients admitted to an accident and emergency (A&E) observation ward following deliberate self harm. METHODS The hospital notes of 568 patients admitted during one year following episodes of deliberate self harm were reviewed. The study was retrospective. RESULTS The majority of these patients had taken an overdose and were between 18 and 35 years of...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate variations in the observation period in the emergency department (ED) in response to bed availability. METHODS A quasi-experimental pre-test post-test study without a control group was conducted in the ED observation ward over 2 1-month periods. During this time the only variable that changed was the number of beds available, which decreased from 20 (pre-test period) to ...

BACKGROUND Studies of length of stay (LOS) in hospital usually focus on physician-independent factors. In this study, the authors identified physician-dependent factors and tested an intervention aimed at them to determine its effect on LOS. METHODS A prospective comparison of LOS on 2 general medical wards in a tertiary care teaching hospital before and after the intervention. The pre-interv...

BACKGROUND Earlier studies indicate that midwife-led birth settings are associated with modest benefits, including reduced medical interventions and increased maternal satisfaction. The generalizability of these studies to birth settings with low intervention rates, like those generally found in Norway, is not obvious. The aim of the present study was to compare intervention rates associated wi...

Review of a consecutive series of the elderly patients who presented unheralded to the Accident and Emergency Department of the Royal Gwent Hospital showed that a relative minority (11%) were difficult to manage because they had no obvious acute medical condition or injury which qualified them for admission by the firms to whom they were first referred. The difficulty was compounded by the shor...