Many patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) have predictable medical and discharge outcomes, but some trajectories are marked with medical uncertainty. Stressed family-surrogates receive multiple medical updates from a variety of personnel. These circumstances can lead to confusion, which may result in conflicts and dissatisfaction with care. This study examined the effects of adding a famil...

Physician assistants (PAs) have been used for decades in the Canadian military. Now, PAs are being introduced in various clinical settings to provide patient care for the general population. This article reviews major developments in the PA profession across Canada over the last decade. Nearly 541 PAs are employed in Canada or work for a Canadian agency. Growing evidence demonstrates the positi...

BACKGROUND Determining if a transfer of a skilled nursing facility (SNF) patient/resident to an acute hospital is potentially avoidable or preventable is challenging. Most previous research on potentially avoidable or preventable hospitalizations is based on diagnoses without in-depth root cause analysis (RCA), and few studies have examined SNF staff perspective on preventability of transfers. ...

Few, if any, studies have investigated the effect of professional experience as a rater variable and type of assessment as a task variable on raters’ criteria in the assessment of speech acts. This study aimed to explore the impact of nonnative teachers’ professional experience on the use of criteria in monologic and dialogic assessment of 12 role-plays of 3 apology speech acts. To this end, 60...

BACKGROUND BATHE is an acronym for Background, Affect, Trouble, Handling, and Empathy and refers to specific questions or comments incorporated into a standard medical interview. The BATHE technique was developed as a rapid psychosocial intervention for the assessment of psychological factors that may contribute to patients' physical complaints. The present research was designed to determine wh...

BACKGROUND To determine why emergency department (ED) patients leave without being seen (LWBS) by a physician and to ascertain whether they receive alternative medical care. METHODS A cross-sectional study was conducted of patients who left without being seen by a physician between January 1 and June 30, 1999 in a medical center ED in northern Taiwan. Medical records were reviewed for populat...

Most scarcities that underpin health disparities within and among countries are not natural; rather, they result from policy choices and the operation of social institutions. Using examples from the United States of America: the Chicago heat wave and hurricane Katrina, this paper develops "denaturalizing scarcity" as a strategy for enquiry to inform public-health ethics in an interconnected wor...