OBJECTIVES To assess the prevalence of, and the variation in, avoidable use of metronidazole in the Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare system METHODS Barcode Medication Administration (BCMA) data were retrospectively assessed for all patients hospitalized between January 2006 and December 2010 in acute-care wards of all VA medical centres (VAMCs) with complete BCMA data and at least 10 acute-ca...

OBJECTIVE More than 90% of people spend time in hospital in the last year of life and, in many developed countries, hospitals are the setting in which most people will die. Previous research indicates that a proportion of these hospital admissions could have been avoided. The objective of this study was to establish the extent and cost of potentially avoidable hospital admissions among patients...

A partition of the positive integers into sets A and B avoids a set S ⊂ N if no two distinct elements in the same part have a sum in S. If the partition is unique, S is uniquely avoidable. For any irrational α > 1, Chow and Long constructed a partition which avoids the numerators of all convergents to α, and conjectured that the set Sα which this partition avoided was uniquely avoidable. We pro...

BACKGROUND Avoidable hospitalization conditions (AHCs) are hospitalizations that potentially can be avoided with timely, appropriate outpatient care. The specific reasons for avoidability, and parents and physicians' perspectives on the proportion of actually avoidable pediatric AHCs, have not been examined adequately. OBJECTIVES To identify how pediatric hospitalizations might be avoided, an...

OBJECTIVE To determine the causes and characteristics of maternal deaths in HIV-infected women. DESIGN A retrospective study of maternal deaths in a cohort of HIV-infected women. SETTING A facility-based maternal death review using case records and mortality summaries. METHODS Thirty seven maternal deaths which occurred in HIV-infected women were reviewed in a university teaching hospital...

The issue of whether pressure injuries are avoidable or preventable has been and continues to be an issue of great debate and discussion for many years, and it has significant legal and regulatory implications related to prevention of wounds due to pressure. The following position paper outlines the position of the Wound, Ostomy and Continence Nurses Society (WOCN) on avoidable versus unavoidab...

AIMS Cardiac disease is emerging as an important contributor to maternal deaths in both lower-to-middle and higherincome countries. There has been a steady increase in the overall institutional maternal mortality rate in South Africa over the last decade. The objectives of this study were to determine the cardiovascular causes and contributing factors of maternal death in South Africa, and iden...

This paper explores the link between utilization of ambulatory care and the likelihood of rehospitalization for an avoidable reason in veterans served by the Veteran Health Administration (VA). The analysis used administrative data containing healthcare utilization and patient characteristics stored at the national VA data warehouse, the Corporate Franchise Data Center. The study sample consist...