OBJECTIVES The UK Department of Health has made recommendations on safe and appropriate prescribing of anti-infectives. In response, we reviewed our anti-infective policies to ensure they were in line with best practice. As a result, a new adult anti-infective policy was launched. To help facilitate its implementation, a quality improvement programme was established, with the aim of achieving >...

Aims. (1) To assess the efficacy and safety of pediatric office-based sedation for ophthalmologic procedures using a pediatric sedation service model. (2) To assess the reduction in hospital charges of this model of care delivery compared to the operating room (OR) setting for similar procedures. Background. Sedation is used to facilitate pediatric procedures and to immobilize patients for imag...

To curtail the rising numbers of cyclists seriously injured in road crashes, more insights are needed into the factors that contribute to these crashes. For instance, darkness is known to be associated with higher injury rates, but little is known about the relative influence of factors such as poor conspicuity, impaired perception and alcohol use among cyclists. To examine these factors, the p...

The aim of this study was to examine cancer patients' reactions to the offer of access to their medical records, hospital doctors' preconceptions of patient access to medical records and the reality of access to records for both parties. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 32 patients and 21 hospital doctors. Hospital doctors were also shown letters from their department to the genera...

Our aging population has exacerbated strong and divergent trends between health human resource supply and demand. One way to mitigate future inequities is through the adoption of health information technology (HIT). Our previous research showed a number of risks and mitigating factors which affected HIT implementation success. We confirmed these findings through semistructured interviews with n...

Statistics are presented on the utilization of short-stay hospitals based on data collected in the Hospital Discharge Survey from a national sample of hospital records of discharged patients. Discharges, days of care, and average length of stay are distributed by each of the variables age, sex, and color of patient and by geographic region, bed size, and type of ownership (control) of hospital....

BACKGROUND/AIMS Some patients on opioid maintenance treatment (OMT) leave treatment temporarily or permanently. This study investigated whether patients interrupting their OMT differed from non-interrupters in sociodemographic and drug-use characteristics and examined acute/sub-acute somatic morbidity among the interrupters, prior to, during, and after OMT. METHODS Cohort design. OBSERVATION ...

Adjustment for the differing risk profiles of patients is essential to the use of administrative hospital data for epidemiological research. Smoking is an important factor to include in such adjustments, but the accuracy of the diagnostic codes denoting smoking in hospital records is unknown. The aims of this study were to measure the validity of current smoking and ever smoked status identifie...

Patients with epilepsy have a mortality rate higher than that of the general population. Some of this excess mortality is attributable to sudden unexpected death (SUDEP). We examined the incidence of this phenomenon both retrospectively and prospectively in the population of South Dublin and Wicklow over the period May 1992-1995. Cases were ascertained by examination of post-mortem registers of...