One of the relevant tasks of the teaching-learning process is that of evaluation. In this sense, estimating the academic performance exhibited by the final evaluation of a student, at the end of the current semester, has become of particular interest for students, parents, educators, educative managers and researchers alike. More specifically, the current paper is focused in determining whether...

BACKGROUND Laparoscopic examination is a useful investigation in the evaluation of infertile women. To perform this test, pneumoperitoneum is required to distend the abdomen, improve visibility and displace the intestines out of the pelvis. Several gases have been used to achieve this purpose including Nitrous Oxide (N2O), Carbondioxide (CO2), Helium, Xenon andAir. STUDY DESIGN AND METHOD Thi...

Patients, next of kin and nurses in surgical wards often raise existential questions in the encounter between life and death. Nurses' emotional knowing at this encounter is crucial. Consequently, this study's purpose was to analyse and describe nurses' emotional knowing to reveal (a) how this knowing is expressed in daily work and (b) what emotions, thoughts and actions this knowing includes. T...

Suprapubic aspiration of the bladder has proved a safe and reliable method of collecting urine for culture. It avoids contamination of the specimen and dispenses with the need for colony counts, because the isolation of any organism indicates bladder bacteriuria. In addition, urine collected in this way can be kept at 4 degrees C. or at room temperature for up to 10 days before it is cultured.

The performance of operative surgery has an understandable focus placed on dexterity, technical precision, as well as the choice of procedure. There is less appreciation of the cognitive and social skills of the individual surgeon and the effect that these have on the surgical team and on patient outcome. This article highlights that impact and explores the contribution of non-technical skills ...

Bedside pleuroscopy can be used in daily practice by medical pulmonologists if a patient cannot tolerate either general anesthesia or being moved to an operating or endoscopy room due to their critical condition. It is a simple and safe technique that rarely has complications. The aim of this review is to summarize recent literatures about bedside pleuroscopy and share our experiences with usin...

The esophageal Doppler monitor is a recent development in hemodynamic monitoring that is used for surgical patients. It is relatively noninvasive and measures descending aortic blood flow by the Doppler effect. A comparison of this new monitor with the pulmonary artery catheter is cited numerous times throughout the literature and overall correlates well. Studies of the esophageal Doppler monit...

After decades of neglect, the resurgence of tuberculosis in the United States between 1985 and 1992 renewed interest in the use of upper room ultraviolet germicidal irradiation to interrupt the transmission of airborne infections. More recently the bioterrorism threat and the appearance of new pathogens with the potential for airborne spread, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), ha...

A fundamental aspect of any concurrent system is how processes communicate with each other. Ultimately, all communication involves concurrent reads and writes of shared memory cells, or registers. The stronger the guarantees provided by a register, the more useful it is to the user, but the harder it may be to implement in practice. Thus it is of interest to determine which types of registers c...

Though controversy exists regarding the utility of pulmonary artery catheters (PAC), their use persists in select patients. Knotting of these catheters upon insertion is a rare but serious complication. We present 2 cases of coagulopathic patients undergoing orthotopic liver transplantation complicated by PAC knotting on attempted line placement. Both knotted PAC were successfully removed nonsu...