Since primary care services face their biggest challenges in the reorganisation of the NHS, a major theme for future service delivery is the effective management of clients with long-term conditions. Nationally, PCTs are committed to preparing experienced, senior nurses as community matrons, who will lead integrated health and social care for people with multiple long-term conditions and reduce...

A prototype of a low-cost balance board for exergaming-based tele-rehabilitation systems is introduced. The objective is to extend at patient’s home the interactive nature of the individualized rehabilitation therapies traditionally carried out at clinic. Preliminary results on posturographic tests showed encouraging performance.

Introduction Deliberate self-poisoning is a common presentation to hospitals, with 13,268 presentations to Scottish hospitals in 2004 accounting for 1.11% of total admissions [1]. It accounts for up to 4% of ICU admissions, with the majority being under forty years old and predominantly male [2]. In a recent study of 481 patients, the average length of stay was 0.7 days, and hospital mortality ...

BACKGROUND Screening of immigrants has been a widespread response to the global resurgence of tuberculosis but has been criticized as discriminatory and stigmatising. Acceptability is an essential but neglected ethical prerequisite of screening programmes, particularly those targeting vulnerable groups such as refugees. No data exist concerning acceptability of tuberculosis screening. We theref...

The health care system in the United States has a shortage of nurses. A careful planning of nurse resources is needed to ease the health care system from the burden of the nurse shortage and standardize nurse workload. An earlier research study developed a data-integrated simulation to evaluate nurse-patient assignments (SIMNA) at the beginning of a shift based on a real data set provided by a ...

This paper investigates the difference in the health conditions and the health care consumption of uninsured individuals as compared to individuals with private insurance, using a nationally representative data set of inpatient hospital admissions from the US. In line with the previous literature, our results indicate that uninsured individuals are, on average, in worse health conditions. Howev...

While the body of evidence-based healthcare interventions grows, the ability of health systems to deliver these interventions effectively and efficiently lags behind. Quality improvement approaches, such as the model for improvement, have demonstrated some success in healthcare but their impact has been lessened by implementation challenges. To help address these challenges, we describe the emp...

BACKGROUND Long-term conditions have a significant impact on individuals, their families, and the health service. As people with these conditions represent a high proportion of hospital admissions, investigating their experiences of inpatient care has become an important area of investigation. We conducted a secondary analysis of the NHS adult inpatient survey for England to compare the hospita...

Quality improvement is needed to meet the demands for quality while simultaneously reducing the cost of delivered health care. In a competitive market of corporate hospitals, quality improvement would lower the proportion of unit cost relative to potential revenue thereby increasing profit. For public hospitals, the mandate for 'minimum quality', which is the basis for accreditation, could also...