INTRODUCTION The mastectomy clinical pathway was developed to optimise the clinical care and cost management of breast cancer patients. The aim of this study was to prospectively assess the effect of the mastectomy pathway at the National University Hospital, Singapore over a 7-month period. MATERIALS AND METHODS A prospective study was carried out on all breast cancer patients admitted for e...

PURPOSE To ascertain the effects of a clinical pathway in our institution. METHODS This retrospective and comparative study was performed on all patients undergoing total knee arthroplasty over a 5-year period. This period covered the 30 months prior to the introduction of the pathway (group 1), and the 30 months following its introduction (group 2). RESULTS There was a significant reductio...

BACKGROUND Asthma is one of the most prevalent childhood chronic illnesses in the United States leading to nearly 190,000 pediatric hospitalizations yearly. In response to the increasing number of children with asthma being hospitalized, some institutions have developed and implemented clinical pathways and are now reporting their findings in the literature. The purpose of this paper was to con...

interferons (ifns) are a family of small regulatory glycoproteins that play a central role in the defense against viral infections. although ifns have been initially discovered as antiviral factors, today they are known as an integral part of the cytokine network that affect a wide range of biological processes. ifns exert their pleiotropic effects through their multisubunit cell surface recept...

Study sample Power calculations were not used to determine the sample size. The study sample comprised 82 hospitalised patients who were to have a gastrectomy. CP was used for all the 46 (28 male and 18 female) patients who made up two wards from the total of five. The 36 (24 male and 12 female) patients in the remaining three wards received traditional individual consultation from doctors and ...

A clinical pathway implements best medical practices and represents sequencing and timing of interventions by clinicians for a particular clinical presentation. We used a Bayesian belief network (BBN) to model a clinical pathway for radical prostatectomy and to categorize patient's length of stay (LOS) as being met or delayed given the patient's outcomes and activities. A BBN model constructed ...

Background Asthma is the most common chronic disease among Danish children and the aim of the treatment should be total control and no symptoms. Successful asthma management involves guideline-based treatment and regular follow-up. The international guidelines from “Global Initiative for Asthma” (GINA) are implemented as a clinical pathway and can improve intersectional collaboration on childre...

Clinical care pathways and case management are strategies utilized by increasing numbers of hospitals to meet the challenges of capitated reimbursement and managed care. A clinical pathway is an outcome-focused tool used to define a multidisciplinary plan of care. A case manager coordinates patient care across an episode of illness or hospitalization. These tools and systems have great potentia...

This article addresses first the definition of a (care) pathway, and then follows a description of theories since the 1950s. It ends with a discussion of theoretical advantages and disadvantages of care pathways for patients and professionals. The objective of this paper is to provide a theoretical base for empirical studies on care pathways. The knowledge for this chapter is based on several b...

The goal of reducing the length of a patient's hospital stay after orthopaedic surgery has recently gained much interest from surgeons and hospital administrators. The influence of hospital stay reduction on qualitative outcome is not always documented. The purpose of this study was to investigate this relationship in more detail. We report our experience with patients undergoing total knee art...