BACKGROUND On 21 June 2005, a passenger train collided with a truck near Revadim, Israel. The collision resulted in a multiple-scene mass-casualty incident in an area characterized by difficult access and a relatively long distance from trauma centers. A major disaster response was initiated by civilian and military medical forces including the Israeli Air Force (IAF) Search and Rescue teams. T...

The scope of this article is to analyze the working process of administrators at a Federal University Hospital (HUF). It includes research with a qualitative approach conducted through interviews with twelve administrators. The work process, the work tools and the human activity per se are understood to be under scrutiny. Work is acknowledged as a category that analyzes the management methods u...

BACKGROUND The phenomenon of discharge against medical advice (DAMA) among pediatric patients places pediatricians in a dilemma between respect for the parent's decision and the desire to provide complete care for the vulnerable child-patient. Little has been written about factors that affect a pediatrician's decision to allow a parent to discharge his child against medical advice. This qualita...

T his paper is one of four interrelated papers resulting from the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control (Summit) convened in June 2008 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Society of Law, Medicine, & Ethics. Each of the papers deals with one of the four core elements of legal preparedness...

General concern about increasing reports of emergencies caused by or attributed to the exposure of human beings to various toxic agents has created demand for assessing the informational performance of a Brazilian network of 34 poison control centers (PCCs), located in different regions of the country and pertaining to the National Poison Information System (SINITOX). The primary purpose of the...

CONTRIBUTING REVIEWERS The editors of BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making would like to thank all our reviewers who have contributed to the journal in Volume 15 (2015).

Every U.S. state has developed legal rules to address end-of-life decision making. No law to date has effectively dealt with medical futility--an issue that has engendered significant debate in the medical and legal literature, many court cases, and a formal opinion from the American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs. In 1999, Texas was the first state to adopt a law...

The purpose of the current study was to explore what hospitalized patients would like to know about post-acute care (PAC) services to ultimately help them make an informed decision when offered PAC options. Thirty hospitalized adults 55 and older in a Northeastern U.S. academic medical center participated in a qualitative descriptive study with conventional content analysis as the analytical te...

INTRODUCTION Terrorist attacks have occurred in Tel-Aviv that have caused mass-casualties. The objective of this study was to draw lessons from the medical response to an event that occurred on 19 January 2006, near the central bus station, Tel-Aviv, Israel. The lessons pertain to the management of primary triage, evacuation priorities, and rapid primary distribution between adjacent hospitals ...