Aim: Evaluating hospital disaster preparedness is one the best ways for hospital accreditation. The aim of this study was to evaluate the quality of outcome measure that offer the level of measurement, reliability and validity that are known as the ‘ psychometric properties’ of the current hospital disaster preparedness tools. Methods: In total, 140 studies were retrieved. Studies which had bee...

OBJECTIVE During the consensus meetings of the National Institute of Mental Health Measurement and Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (NIMH-MATRICS) Initiative, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration took the position that a drug for this purpose should show changes on 1) an accepted consensus cognitive performance measure and 2) an additional measure (i.e., a co-primary) t...

BACKGROUND The health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of asthmatic children and their caregivers is correlated to management of the disease and the presence of certain morbidity indicators. The integral assessment of paediatric asthma must include the evaluation of HRQoL among the caregivers, although existing questionnaires only partially assess the dimensions of this aspect. The present study...

An Aspect Oriented approach to implement fault detection in automatic measurement systems is proposed. Faults are handled by means of “aspects”, a specific software unit to better modularize issues transversal to many modules (“crosscutting concerns”). In this way, maintainability and reusability of a measurement software are improved: indeed, once a modification of the fault detection policy o...

Symptoms of disordered eating are common among patients seeking bariatric surgery, and assessment of eating pathology is typical in pre-surgical evaluations. A systematic review was conducted to evaluate the definitions, diagnostic criteria and measures used to assess disordered eating in adults seeking bariatric surgery. The review identified 147 articles featuring 34 questionnaires and 45 int...

BACKGROUND The Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) is a short instrument, developed to assess perceived social support. The original English version has been widely used. The original scale has demonstrated satisfactory psychometric properties in different settings, but no validated Swedish version has been available. The aim was therefore to translate, adapt and psychome...

BACKGROUND Negative symptoms are considered core symptoms of schizophrenia. The Brief Negative Symptom Scale (BNSS) was developed to measure this symptomatic dimension according to a current consensus definition. The present study examined the psychometric properties of the German version of the BNSS. To expand former findings on convergent validity, we employed the Temporal Experience Pleasure...

AIM To evaluate the association between idiopathic mitral valve prolapse and panic disorder. METHODS The study comprised 50 patients with idiopathic mitral valve prolapse, 50 patients with panic disorder, and 50 healthy controls. All subjects underwent echocardiographic evaluation. If idiopathic mitral valve prolapse was present, the level of prolapse was measured. To reach psychiatric diagno...