INTRODUCTION Presently, it is difficult to predict which patients are at increased risk of ongoing pain problems postoperatively. This study followed a group of patients from the week before their operation until 3 months after it, to identify potential risk variables. METHODS Fifty-four patients undergoing moderate-major gynaecological surgery at Christchurch Women's Hospital were recruited ...

The Stability and Growth Pact is under fire. Problems have appeared in sticking to the rules. Proposals to reform the Pact or ditch it altogether abound. But is the Pact a flawed fiscal rule? Against established criteria for an ideal fiscal rule, its design and compliance mechanisms fare reasonably well. Where weaknesses are found, they tend to reflect tradeoffs typical of supra-national arrang...

BACKGROUND Contemporary vancomycin dosing schemes are designed to achieve an area under the curve (AUC) to minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) ratio of ≥400. However, scant clinical data exist to support this target and available data relied on pharmacokinetic formulas based on daily vancomycin dose and estimated renal function (demographic pharmacokinetic model) to estimate AUCs. METHODS ...

Primiparous beef cows produced in 3 calving systems were used in a 2-yr study with a completely random design to measure milk yield throughout a 190-d lactation (2002, n = 20; 2003, n = 24 per calving system). Calving occurred in late winter (average calving date = February 4 +/- 2 d), early spring (average calving date = March 30 +/- 2 d), and late spring (average calving date = May 26 +/- 1 d...

Test generation is a program-synthesis problem: starting from the formal specification of a system under test, and from a test purpose describing a set of behaviours to be tested, compute a reactive program that observes an implementation of the system to detect non-conformant behaviour, while trying to control it towards satisfying the test purpose. In this paper we describe an approach for ge...

Some systems interact with their environment at a number of physically distributed interfaces called ports. When testing such a system under test (SUT) it is normal to place a local tester at each port and the local testers form a local test case. If the local testers cannot interact with one another and there is no global clock then we are testing in the distributed test architecture. In this ...

OBJECTIVES The ratio of observed to expected mortality (standardized mortality ratio, SMR), is a key indicator of quality of care. We use PreControl Charts to investigate SMR behavior over time of an existing tree-model for predicting mortality in intensive care units (ICUs) and its implications for hospital ranking. We compare the results to those of a logistic regression model. METHODS We c...

Randomly generated stimulus in functional verification provides significant advantages in validating a wide range of scenarios. However, random generation requires a more sophisticated verification environment, one that is more difficult to build and maintain. To enjoy the benefits that random stimuli has to offer, verification teams need to rely on their tools to fully cover the specified DUT ...

BACKGROUND As community case management of childhood illness expands in low-income countries, there is a need to assess the quality of care provided by community health workers. This study had the following objectives: 1) examine methods of recruitment of sick children for assessment of quality of care, 2) assess the validity of register review (RR) and direct observation only (DO) compared to ...

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY Family caregivers experience high levels of stress that place them at risk for poor health outcomes. We explore whether an intervention which lowers caregivers' daily exposure to stressors, adult day services (ADS), leads to improved regulation of the stress hormone, cortisol, which has implications for health and well-being. DESIGN AND METHODS Participants (N = 158) were...