The older dental patient – who cares?

Patient safety--who cares?

Medical errors and adverse events are a serious threat to patients worldwide. In recent years methodologically sound studies have demonstrated that interventions exist, can be implemented and can have sustainable, measurable positive effects on patient safety. Nonetheless, system-wide progress and adoption of safety practices is slow and evidence of improvements on the organisational and system...

Who cares?

Who cares for the patient with head injury now?

OBJECTIVE A recent report on head injury management from the Royal College of Surgeons of England suggests that surgeons are unsuited to the inpatient care of head injuries (ICHI) and should hand over responsibility entirely to neurosurgeons and accident and emergency (A&E) specialists. This prompted a survey of A&E consultants to establish their opinions on the current and future practice of h...

User Interfaces; Who Cares?

According to Michael Stonebraker’s experiences, if you select a group of well-known experts in database research and ask them to identify the domains where meeting use+ requirements is of primary importance and at the ‘same time more significant advances are needed and more research should be promoted, user interfaces comes out as number one in the list. This has been the case over the last dec...

Medication adherence: WHO cares?

The treatment of chronic illnesses commonly includes the long-term use of pharmacotherapy. Although these medications are effective in combating disease, their full benefits are often not realized because approximately 50% of patients do not take their medications as prescribed. Factors contributing to poor medication adherence are myriad and include those that are related to patients (eg, subo...