The adverse health effects of lead exposure in children are well described and include intellectual and behavioral deficits, making lead exposure an important public health problem. No safe blood lead level (BLL) in children has been identified. To estimate the number of children aged 1-5 years in the United States at risk for adverse health effects from lead exposure and to assess the impact o...

OBJECTIVE Estimates of healthcare costs associated with HIV infection would provide valuable insight for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of possible prevention interventions. We evaluate the additional lifetime healthcare cost incurred due to living with HIV. METHODS We used a stochastic computer simulation model to project the distribution of lifetime outcomes and costs of men-who-have-sex...

OBJECTIVE To develop a standard taxonomy for inpatient complaints that could be adopted in a wide array of health service institutions. DESIGN A taxonomy was developed by merging the coding schemes from eight prior studies of patient complaints, and then by revising the received coding scheme in light of the codes and clarifications that emerged from a content analysis of patient complaints. ...

The National Health Service (NHS) is facing financial constraints and thus there is considerable interest in ensuring the shortest but optimal hospital stays possible. The aim of this study was to investigate patterns of postoperative length of stay (LOS) stay across the English NHS and to identify factors that significantly influence both optimal and prolonged LOS.Data were obtained from the N...

INTRODUCTION hospital malnutrition is a frequent worldwide problem and its potential issues related include increased complications, length of stay, mortality, and healthcare costs. OBJECTIVES the aim of this study was to establish the cost-effectiveness of early nutritional therapy for malnourished patients in a high complexity hospital. MATERIALS AND METHODS this analytical study with eco...

Tuberculosis (TB) primarily occurs in the foreign-born in European countries, such as the UK, where increasing notifications and the high proportion of foreign-born cases has refocused attention on immigrant (new entrant) screening. We investigated how UK primary care organisations (PCOs) screen new entrants and whether this differs according to TB burden in the PCOs (incidence < 20 or ≥ 20 cas...

BACKGROUND Decisionmakers and guideline developers demand rapid syntheses of the evidence when time sensitive evidence-informed decisions are required. A potential trade-off of such rapid reviews is that their results can have less reliability than results of systematic reviews that can lead to an increased risk of making incorrect decisions or recommendations. We sought to determine how much i...

BACKGROUND Bangladesh has committed to universal health coverage, and options to decrease household out-of-pocket expenditure (OPE) are being explored. Understanding the determinants of OPE is an essential step. This study aimed to estimate and identify determinants of OPE in seeking health care for sick under-five children. METHODS Cross-sectional data was collected by structured questionnai...

Importance Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often persists into adolescence, when motor vehicle crash risk peaks. We know little about when adolescents with ADHD get licensed and, once they do, the extent to which they have increased crash risk compared with adolescents without ADHD. Objectives To examine the association between ADHD and both driver licensing and crash involvem...

Purpose and context: ‘Gesundes Kinzigtal’ is one of the few population-based integrated care approaches in Germany, organising care across all health service sectors and indications. The system is run by a regional health management company (Gesundes Kinzigtal GmbH) in cooperation with the regional physicians’ network and with two statutory health insurers (among them is the biggest health insu...