Background: Achieving a high degree of diagnostic accuracy is important in practice of medicine. High degree of accuracy of provisional diagnosis may lead to use of lesser number of investigations with lesser cost burden to the health sector. Therefore, this gap analysis study aims to find out that how accurately provisional diagnosis matches final diagnosis. Methodology: This was a retrospecti...

OBJECTIVES The paediatric and adolescent clinical psychology service at the University College London Hospital provides age-appropriate services to young people up to 19 years of age under the care of a hospital consultant. This short report describes how young people and parents experience what we provide as a systemic paediatric psychology team from referral to discharge. METHOD A semi-stru...

Over the past few years, CMS has urged senior leadership to develop strategic policy directions and initiatives to improve the nation’s healthcare system. CMS believes that the post-acute care product is not well defined. Differences in assessment instruments make detailed comparisons across the settings difficult and/or impossible. Without a uniform patient assessment methodology for postacute...

Over half the patients who were admitted to hospital after self-poisoning had seen their general practitioner in the previous month, and in half of those discharged from hospital no definite after-care arrangements were made. Opportunities for prevention of occurrences are being missed. Thorough follow-up of 135 such patients identified many non-medical problems, and over 80 per cent were helpe...

Background: Hospital readmissions have been a major challenge to the US health system. Medicare data shows that approximately 25% of Medicare skilled nursing facility (SNF) residents are readmitted back to the hospital within 30 days. Some of the major reasons for high readmission rates include fragmented information exchange during transitions of care and limited access to physicians round-the...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES It is Ugandan governmental policy that all surgical care delivered at government hospitals in Uganda is to be provided to patients free of charge. In practice, however, frequent stock-outs and broken equipment require patients to pay for large portions of their care out of their own pocket. The purpose of this study was to determine the financial impact on patients who...

OBJECTIVES To assess the degree of appropriate referral to the accident and emergency (A&E) department following the use of a community alarm where a mobile warden works in conjunction with the community alarm control centre. METHODS 611 consecutive calls using community alarms underwent assessment and the appropriateness of referral to the A&E department was considered. RESULTS Of 542 requ...

AIM This study aimed to ascertain whether a model of risk screening carried out by an experienced community nurse was effective in decreasing re-presentations and readmissions and the length of stay of older people presenting to an Australian emergency department. OBJECTIVES The objectives of the study were to (i) identify all older people who presented to the emergency department of an Austr...

BACKGROUND Although regional variations in the use of many health care services have been reported, little attention has been devoted to home care practices. Given the dramatic shift in care settings from hospitals to private homes, it is important to determine the extent to which home care practices vary by geographic region. METHODS Data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information an...