OBJECTIVE To assess the validity of standardised patients to measure the quality of physicians' practice. DESIGN Validation study of standardised patients' assessments. Physicians saw unannounced standardised patients presenting with common outpatient conditions. The standardised patients covertly tape recorded their visit and completed a checklist of quality criteria immediately afterwards. ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the efficacy of homoeopathic immunotherapy on lung function and respiratory symptoms in asthmatic people allergic to house dust mite. DESIGN Double blind randomised controlled trial. SETTING 38 general practices in Hampshire and Dorset. PARTICIPANTS 242 people with asthma and positive results to skin prick test for house dust mite; 202 completed clinic based assessme...

NARRATIVE REVIEW: This article is a narrative review of the psychometric properties (reliability and validity) and other characteristics (cost, time to administer, and year of publication) of commercially available manual and finger dexterity assessments used for adults in the United States. Complete research articles related to dexterity assessments were gathered from online database searches ...

This study examined whether mental health community service users completed outcome self-reports differently when assessments were supervised by internal vs. external staff. The examination of potential differences between the two has useful implications for mental health systems that take upon themselves the challenge of Routine Outcome Measurement (ROM), as it might impact allocation of publi...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS Patients with empty nose syndrome experience considerable discomfort in their daily lives and treatment is difficult for their physicians. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the outcome of an empty nose syndrome treatment via reconstruction of the inferior turbinate with porous polyethylene (Medpor). DESIGN AND METHOD A prospective self-controlled study was conduc...

Rehabilitation can be referred to as a "black box" because little is known about what specific interventions comprise the rehabilitation process, including patients with spinal cord injury (SCI). Despite that rehabilitation professionals can "see" daily what rehabilitation looks like, the contribution of each intervention to the final outcome of rehabilitation remains unclear. Moreover, there i...

In this contribution we propose a method for generating OWA weighting vectors from the individual assessments on a set of alternatives in such a way that these weights minimize the disagreement among individual assessments and the outcome provided by the OWA operator. For measuring that disagreement we have aggregated distances between individual and collective assessments by using a metric and...

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not a computer may predict the outcome of soundscape assessments, based on acoustic data only. It may be argued that this is impossible, because a computer lack life experience. Moreover, if the computer was able to make an accurate prediction, we also wanted to know what information it needed to make this prediction. We recruited 33 stude...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To produce a priority list for purchasers to use when purchasing elective care in the speciality of orthopaedics so that efficiency in health care purchasing (that is, maximising the benefit per unit of resource available for the resident population) can be achieved. DESIGN The study used cost utility analysis in the elective speciality of orthopaedics. The diagnostic groups i...