BACKGROUND Optimal treatment gives complete relief of symptoms of many disorders. But even if such treatment is available, some patients have persisting complaints. One disorder, from which the patients should achieve complete relief of symptoms with medical or surgical treatment, is gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). Despite the fact that such treatment is cheap, safe and easily available...

BACKGROUND In contrast to a growing body of research on the situation of adult family care givers, in Germany hardly anything is known about the situation of children and teenagers who are involved in the care of their relatives. METHODS In this Grounded Theory study 81 semi structured interviews have been carried out with children and their parents in 34 families, in which one member is chro...

OBJECTIVES To compare the efficacy and safety of ethanolamine oleate (EO) as a sclerosing agent, vs. absolute ethanol (AE), in the treatment of symptomatic simple renal cysts. PATIENTS AND METHODS Between November 2009 and October 2012, 46 patients were prospectively randomised into two groups. All patients presented with a simple renal cyst underwent ultrasonographic aspiration and injection...

BACKGROUND With myriad geospatial datasets now available for terrain information extraction and particularly streamline demarcation, there arises questions regarding the scale, accuracy and sensitivity of the initial dataset from which these aspects are derived, as they influence all other parameters computed subsequently. In this study, digital elevation models (DEM) derived from Advanced Spac...

BACKGROUND In the context of improved utilisation of health care and outcomes, rapid socio-economic development and health system reform in China, it is timely to consider the quality of services. Data on quality of maternal health care as experienced by women is limited. This study explores women's expectations and experiences of the quality of childbirth care in rural China. METHODS Thirty ...

[Abstract] Inertia relief analysis is regarded as an effective technique for the modeling of unconstrained structural systems. In this paper the principle of inertia relief analysis is first described. Inertia relief capability of commercial finite element packages is discussed. The paper studies the implementation of inertia relief techniques into finite element analysis of a variety of struct...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to compare performance measurement in the humanitarian relief chain with performance measurement in the commercial supply chain, develop performance metrics for the humanitarian relief chain, and present a framework that can be used as a basis for a performance measurement system in the relief sector. Design/methodology/approach – The performance measureme...