BACKGROUND The RATPAC trial showed that using a point-of-care panel of CK-MB(mass), myoglobin and troponin at baseline and 90 min increased the proportion of patients successfully discharged home, leading to reduced median length of initial hospital stay. However, it did not change mean hospital stay and may have increased mean costs per patient. The aim of this study was to explore variation i...

OBJECTIVE To characterise pregnancies where the fetus or neonate was diagnosed with fetal and neonatal alloimmune thrombocytopenia (FNAIT) and suffered from intracranial haemorrhage (ICH), with special focus on time of bleeding onset. DESIGN Observational cohort study of all recorded cases of ICH caused by FNAIT from the international No IntraCranial Haemorrhage (NOICH) registry during the pe...

BACKGROUND In 2010, the acute admissions unit (AAU) at Stirling Royal Infirmary had the highest number of cardiac arrests of any ward. A quality improvement project was undertaken to reduce this to <1/1000 admissions by December 2011. METHODS In January 2011, based on initial needs assessment, we selected three initiatives to improve cardiac arrest rate: (1) structured response to deteriorati...

OBJECTIVE To assess the agreement between measures of caregiver's perception and health provider's direct observation of performance in daily living activities among home care elderly patients. METHODS Performance observations were carried out among 40 elderly patients and their respective caregivers were interviewed. During home visits, data on caregiver's perception were collected by an ind...

PURPOSE This article discusses considerations for making ambulatory care pharmacist services at least cost neutral and, ideally, generate a margin that allows for service expansion. SUMMARY The four pillars of business sustainability are leadership, staffing, information technology, and compensation. A key facet of leadership in ambulatory care pharmacy practice is creating and expressing a c...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to implement self-care support for leg lymphedema patients using mobile phones and to investigate the effects thereof. PATIENTS AND METHODS A total of 30 patients with lymphedema following female genital cancer surgery (stages I to II) who were referred from a nearby gynecologist were randomly divided into groups for routine self-care support (control group...

Introduction Pragmatic trials of treatment pathways can require patient awareness of treatment allocation in order to better represent clinical reality, for example when concordance with a treatment has an important effect on outcome. Conversely, masking of treating clinicians to allocation group can be impossible when full clinical assessment requires knowledge of the current treatments, resou...

abstract  background: in the recent decade, many primary total knee arthroplasties have  been carried out in iran and the number of revision cases is expected to rise with the  aging population. the aim of this study was to report the outcome of revision surgery  in the country and make a comparison between the outcome of revision and that of  the primary arthroplasty.  methods: retrospectively...