BACKGROUND The implementation and use of telecare requires significant changes to healthcare service organisation and delivery, including new ways of working for staff. Competency development and training for healthcare professionals is therefore required to enable necessary adaptation of clinical practice and ensure competent provision of telecare services. It is however unclear what skills he...

BACKGROUND Professional misconduct in healthcare, a (generally) lasting situation in which patients are at risk or actually harmed, can jeopardise the health and well-being of patients and the quality of teamwork. Two types of professional misconduct can be distinguished: misconduct associated with incompetence and that associated with impairment. This study aimed to (1) quantify home-care nurs...

We describe an outbreak of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) ST398 in a nursing home in the Netherlands. Seven residents and 4 healthcare workers were identified with MRSA ST398, but 2 of the healthcare workers carried other strains. This study demonstrates that MRSA ST398 can spread in nursing homes.

Alzheimer's disease is a devastating chronic disease that significantly increases healthcare costs and affects the quality of life (QoL) of the afflicted patients and their caregivers. Population aging and other demographic changes may further increase the already staggering costs of this devastating disease. While few pharmacoeconomic studies have used a prospective health economics design to ...

This paper discusses the available and emerging technology for healthcare at home, the potential it has to transform healthcare as a whole, the slow pace of adoption and introduces a new regional research consortium that aims to build the pathways to ubiquitous adoption. There is a plethora of intelligent technologies already available and new technologies are emerging to better support care in...

New sensory technologies and smaller, more capable mobile devices open opportunities for pervasive computing in the healthcare sector. Patients as well as medical professionals are, from a information and communication technology (ICT) point of view, better equipped than ever before. Despite this, many hospitals and other healthcare service providers have yet to exploit the potential unleashed ...

Dried blood spot (DBS) sampling for the purpose of therapeutic drug monitoring can be an attractive alternative for conventional blood sampling, especially in children. This study aimed to compare all costs involved in conventional sampling versus DBS home sampling in two pediatric populations: renal transplant patients and hemato-oncology patients. Total costs were computed from a societal per...