BACKGROUND Increasing evidence suggests that illnesses and injuries leading to restricted activity have adverse functional consequences, but whether the two components of restricted activity have comparable effects is unknown. We evaluated whether an illness/injury leading to bed rest represents a more potent exposure than one leading to cutting down on one's usual activities without bed rest. ...

CONTEXT Globally, abortion-related morbidity places a largely unmeasured physical, social and economic burden on women, yet little research has examined population-level morbidity, particularly in developing countries. METHODS Data were drawn from a representative 2002 survey in Madhya Pradesh, India, of married women aged 15-39 who had at least one child; the analysis examined 966 abortion a...

A quality improvement project was initiated on Ivory ward, a functional older adult psychiatric inpatient ward at Newham Centre for Mental Health, part of the East London NHS Foundation Trust. The project was started by staff on the ward after it had come to their attention that their ward had the highest bed occupancy and length of stay across similar wards in the trust. The mean bed occupancy...

The traditional model of acute medical care involves the admission of patients to hospital to be assessed by a consultant and facilitate access to investigation and treatment. This model has, however, led to a number of problems. Firstly, there is high bed occupancy which restricts access and increases the risk of healthcare-acquired infection. Secondly, only limited training opportunities are ...

This article presents a case study of how one health system-Health First, in Brevard County, Florida-addressed resource challenges by using Lean thinking enabled by information technology. Examining Health First provides an opportunity to learn about how one hospital system addressed these challenges by making fundamental changes in their operations, in advance of the shift toward accountable c...

The bed bug, Cimex lectularius L., like other bed bug species, is difÞcult to visually locate because it is cryptic. Detector dogs are useful for locating bed bugs because they use olfaction rather than vision. Dogs were trained to detect the bed bug (as few as one adult male or female) and viable bed bug eggs (Þve, collected5Ð6dafter feeding)byusingamodiÞed foodandverbal reward system.Their ef...

Recent studies have documented that a significant increase in the use of observation stays along with extensive variation in patterns of use across hospitals.The objective of this longitudinal observational study was to examine the extent to which patient, hospital, and local health system characteristics explain variation in observation stay rates across Veterans Health Administration (VHA) ho...

Daytime oral melatonin typically exerts soporific and thermoregulatory effects; however, it is not clear whether these effects reflect the normal physiological response to endogenous nocturnal melatonin production. We infused melatonin at doses that produced physiological and supraphysiological steady-state levels in 24 young adults during two daytime bed rest protocols. From 1000 to 1630, subj...

For a number of reasons, hospitals appoint fulltime and part-time physicians to practice medicine within the hospital or its outlying divisions. Such physicians provide a wide variety of primary, specialty, and subspecialty services. Among other advantages for hospitals are a potentially tighter rein on quality control and an increased bed occupancy and revenue at a time when financial issues h...