Objective: To study how ear and rectal body temperatures relate to each other over time in febrile patients. Methods: Descriptive cohort study with repeated measurements. The setting was a Unit for Infectious Diseases at a county hospital in Sweden. Patients, ≥ 18 years, admitted for suspected infection and with a rectal or ear temperature of ≥ 37.5◦C were invited. 16 females and 24 men, 19 to ...

BACKGROUND Previous research suggests that the World Health Organization Surgical Safety Checklist time-out reduces communication failures and medical complications and supports development of better safety attitudes. Previous research also indicates that different values can affect the implementation of interventions. OBJECTIVE To investigate the actual usage of the checklist in practice and...

PURPOSE Epilepsy is a chronic condition that is best treated in the outpatient clinic setting. However, many epilepsy patients use the hospital emergency room (ER) as a primary resource for seizure management. We studied characteristics of these patients in comparison with patients attending an epilepsy clinic. METHODS We reviewed ER data of patients seen in 2002 and 2003 for seizures, in Van...

OBJECTIVE The economic benefits of reducing emergency department (ED) crowding are potentially substantial as they may decrease hospital length of stay. Hospital administrators and public officials may therefore be motivated to implement crowding protocols. We sought to identify a potential cost of ED crowding by evaluating the contribution of excess ED length of stay (LOS) to overall hospital ...

OBJECTIVE Two demographically similar counties included in the New York Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Surveillance Network had very different prevalence rates. This study examined the components of the surveillance in an attempt to discover the reasons for this discrepancy. METHODS Erie County and Monroe County were the 2 most populous counties included in the New York Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Surveil...

Since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, there has been an increasing need to monitor environmental health trends that may be related to the rapid industrialization of the United States/Mexico border. We studied two counties on the California/Baja California border to obtain baseline data on trends in childhood asthma hospitalizations and two pollutants that aggrava...

• The Clark County Domestic Violence Court has improved the County's ability to deal with domestic violence perpetrators and victims. • Given the apparent increase in domestic violence cases in Clark County there may be a need to allocate additional resources to the court. • There is a need to conduct an outcome evaluation of the Clark County Domestic Violence Court, with a specific focus on th...

In September, October, and November 2014, adult Mansonia titillans were collected at 4 separate sites near Savannah in Chatham County, Georgia, and 1 site in Muscogee County, GA, during routine mosquito surveillance. Although previously recorded from Beaufort County, SC, and several inland southern Georgia counties, recent reports of this species from coastal Georgia or South Carolina are lacki...