Nurses need to establish communication with other healthcare professionals to facilitate the process of care. Healthcare professionals have complementary roles in providing care to patients. As the key members of the healthcare team, nurses also have an important role in establishing communication among other healthcare professionals. The final outcome of professional communication is effective...

BACKGROUND A web-based tool was developed and piloted by being made available to healthcare staff in Wales from September 2012 to March 2013. This evaluation included two primary outcome measures: general health and mental well-being, and six secondary outcome measures: sickness absence, alcohol use, healthy eating, smoking, physical activity and maintaining a healthy BMI. The aim was to assess...

OBJECTIVES To compare the effect of a 6-month community-based intervention with that of usual care on quality of life, depressive symptoms, anxiety, self-efficacy, self-management, and healthcare costs in older adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and 2 or more comorbidities. DESIGN Multisite, single-blind, parallel, pragmatic, randomized controlled trial. SETTING Four communities in...

OBJECTIVE To ascertain the degree of variation, by state of hospitalization, in outcomes associated with traumatic brain injury (TBI) in a pediatric population. DESIGN A retrospective cohort study of pediatric patients admitted to a hospital with a TBI. SETTING Hospitals from states in the United States that voluntarily participate in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Healthc...

The aim of this study was to identify what outcome measures or quality indicators are being used to evaluate advanced and new roles in nine allied health professions and whether the measures are evaluating outcomes of interest to the patient, the clinician, or the healthcare provider. A systematic search strategy was used. Medical and allied health databases were searched and relevant articles ...

BACKGROUND Although the importance and advantages of measurement-based care in mental healthcare are well established, implementation in daily practice is complex and far from optimal. AIMS To accelerate the implementation of outcome measurement in routine clinical practice, a government-sponsored National Quality Improvement Collaborative was initiated in Dutch-specialised mental healthcare....

BACKGROUND Healthcare worker hand hygiene is thought to be one of the most important strategies to prevent healthcare-associated infections, but compliance is generally poor. Hand hygiene improvement interventions must include audits of compliance (almost always with feedback), which are most often done by direct observation - a method that is expensive, subjective, and prone to bias. New techn...

Evidence based medicine implies that healthcare professionals are expected to base their practice on the best available evidence. This means that we should acquire the necessary skills for appraising the medical literature, including the ability to understand and interpret the results of published articles. This article discusses in a simple, practical, 'non-statistician' fashion some of the im...

INTRODUCTION Osteoporotic hip fractures present a significant global challenge to patients, clinicians and healthcare systems. It is estimated that hip fracture accounts for 1.4% of total social and healthcare costs in the established market economies. METHODS AND ANALYSIS The World Hip Trauma Evaluation (WHiTE) was set up to measure outcome in a comprehensive cohort of UK patients with hip f...

Arguably, three outcome categories are of greatest importance to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients, their families and their caregivers: health-related quality of life (including symptom burden); hospitalisations and other forms of healthcare utilisation; and, of course, mortality. Lower levels of baseline physical activity are not only prevalent in patients with COPD [1, 2]...