BACKGROUND Recreational scuba diving involves the use of complex instruments and specialized skills in an unforgiving environment. Errors in dive preparation in such an environment may lead to unsafe conditions, mishaps, injuries and fatalities. Diving mishaps can be major and minor based on their potential to cause injury and the severity of the resulting injury. The objective of this study is...

BACKGROUND Checklists are increasingly used to measure quality of care. Recently we implemented an antibiotic checklist in nine Dutch hospitals and showed that use of the checklist resulted in more appropriate antibiotic use. While more appropriate antibiotic use was associated with a reduction in length of stay, use of the checklist in itself was not. In the current study we explored discrepan...

Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate the symmetry of the isometric strength of the shoulder and scapulothoracic muscles in volleyball and futsal athletes. Methods: In this case-control study, the strength of the scapulothoracic muscles and rotation of the shoulders in 20 adult volleyball athletes and 20 futsal adult athletes, who were randomly selected from sports clubs around Tehran, were me...

Main outcome measures Child behaviour checklist scores at each follow up interval for each of the following components (internalising scale: scoring on feelings of anxiety/depression, withdrawal, somatic complaints; externalising scale: scoring on aggressive behaviour, delinquent behaviour; and scales scoring on attention problems, thought problems and social problems). Individual scores were a...

Mr. Kane's paper examines the role of patients to ensure that they have both the knowledge and power to direct their health care choices. The evolving health care market place is discussed to emphasize the increased importance of individual involvement in health decision making. A checklist sets forth questions which a patient should ask of herself and of her provider before entering into healt...

This editorial addresses the importance of incident reporting, checklists and a just culture to patient safety.

Complications during cerebral aneurysm embolization continue to occur even at high volume experienced centers. Such situations are unexpected, complex and can have devastating consequences. Individual anecdotal experience offers limited guidance. This literature review of the two most serious neuroendovascular procedural complications-namely, aneurysm perforation and thromboemboli-aims to propo...

With increasing Internet coverage, the use of a web-based survey for epidemiological study is a possibility. We performed an investigation in Japan in winter 2008 using the web-based daily questionnaire for health (WDQH). The WDQH is a web-based questionnaire survey formulated to obtain information about the daily physical condition of the general public on a real-time basis, in order to study ...

The purpose of this study was to examine how exercise level, exercise motives, and barriers changed from the baseline phase to the follow-up phase after a behavioural and cognitive intervention aimed at increasing exercise. Seventy-five members of our university community (43 subjects in the control group and 32 in the experimental group), all of whom received cognitive feedback, agreed to comp...