Etiquette-based communication may improve the inpatient experience but is not universally practiced. We sought to determine the extent to which internal medicine interns practice behaviors that characterize etiquette-based medicine. Trained observers evaluated the use of 5 key communication strategies by internal medicine interns during inpatient clinical encounters: introducing one's self, exp...

BACKGROUND In today's short stay hospital settings the contact time for patients is reduced. However, it seems to be more important for the patients that the healthcare professionals are easy to get in contact with during the whole course of treatment, and to have the opportunity to exchange information, as a basis for obtaining individualized information and support. Therefore, the aim was to ...

OBJECTIVE To study the potential of a short stay ward attached to an accident and emergency (A&E) department to improve care and reduce admissions to hospital by enabling elderly patients to be monitored closely for up to 24 h before being formally admitted to hospital or discharged home. Patients admitted to the short stay ward were those who appeared to need only a brief period of assessment ...

This article evaluates the feasibility of developing hospitalization rates for ambulatory care sensitive conditions (ACSCs) for the Medicare+Choice (M+C) population. M+C inpatient encounter data were used to calculate 15 ACSC rates. We found the initial reporting year of M+C inpatient encounter data had no apparent volume or diagnosis-based biases and over 90 percent of M+C organizations had su...

Morag Greig is Advocacy Manager of Glasgow University's institutional repository, Enlighten. She has been involved with repositories since 2003 as one of the managers of the JISC funded DAEDALUS project (2002-2005). Morag is also a subject librarian responsible for physical sciences and music. William J. Nixon has been involved with institutional repositories since the launch of an ePrints pilo...

I discuss three elements of Dennis Schulting’s new book on the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, or categories. First, that Schulting gives a detailed account of the role of each individual category. Second, Schulting’s insistence that the categories nevertheless apply ‘en bloc’. Third, Schulting’s defence of Kant’s so-called reciprocity thesis that subjective ...