BACKGROUND The systemic inflammatory response to Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) is incompletely defined, particularly for patients with severe disease. METHODS Analysis of 315 blood samples from 78 inpatients with CDI (cases), 100 inpatients with diarrhea without CDI (inpatient controls), and 137 asymptomatic outpatient controls without CDI was performed. Serum or plasma was obtained f...

INTRODUCTION The National Burn Repository (NBR) currently only contains inpatient data from participating United States burn centres. However, the majority of the patients treated in burn centres are managed as outpatients. Unfortunately, this significant demographic is not represented in the NBR annual report. The purpose of this study is to compare the difference in aetiology and demographics...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate evidence of the effectiveness of computer-generated health behavior interventions-clinical encounters "in absentia"-as extensions of face-to-face patient care in an ambulatory setting. DATA SOURCES Systematic electronic database and manual searches of multiple sources (1996-1999) plus search for gray literature were conducted to identify clinical trials using computer-ge...

This study examines self-reported coercion in subjects with severe mental illness who were randomly assigned in an experimental study to continue under, or be released from, involuntary outpatient commitment (OPC) subsequent to hospital discharge. After review of bivariate relationships, multivariable analyses demonstrated significantly higher levels of reported coercion among subjects who expe...

intreduction hospitals as main health care prouders have always received great aftention. and in hospitals , special attention ust be paid to the admission unit and its management and organization. the unit plays important role in the evaluation of the hospital. methods and materials it is a descriptive study in which nine inpatients admission units and six outpatient admission units were exami...

Venous thromboembolism is a common medical problem. Recently, the emphasis has been on a switch to outpatient low molecular weight heparin therapy. Previous warfarin nomograms have been developed only for inpatients. We prospectively assessed a warfarin initiation nomogram in 105 consecutive outpatients; the nomogram requires International Normalized Ratio (INR) testing on only days 3, 5, and 8...

UNLABELLED To evaluate the possible effects of outpatient preoperative evaluation (OPE) for new surgical patients who will be inpatients, we conducted an observational study at a university hospital in The Netherlands. Various outcomes before and after the introduction of an OPE clinic were compared. The study population comprised all 21,553 elective adult inpatients operated on between January...

introduction: discharge against medical advice (dama) can be an important indicator of patient dissatisfaction. this study examined the reasons for the dama in shafa hospital (kerman, iran). methods: this was a descriptive cross-sectional study within august 2010 to march 2011 on patients in this hospital. over 9295 inpatients were discharged, 483 had dama and were assigned 190 contacts and out...