OBJECTIVE The population reach of tobacco quitlines is an important measure of treatment seeking and penetration of services. Maine offers an opportunity to examine temporal changes in quitline reach and referral sources in the context of a comprehensive tobacco treatment programme. The impact of a $1.00 cigarette tax increase is also examined. METHODS This is a descriptive analysis of Maine ...

Medical education follows the clinical drive toward patient-centered care and, therefore, puts strong emphasis on the development of empathy by medical students. It has, however, been found that there is a decline in empathy throughout a student's education. Students' participation in role-play as the doctor has been proved to improve patient care in a clinical capacity. Here, it is proposed th...

The present paper reports on the results of a telephone survey of 217 alcohol and drug treatment clinicians on their beliefs and practice, in relation to service provision for women. Nurses comprised the second largest professional group surveyed. Seventy-eight percent of clinicians believed that women's treatment needs differed from men's and 74% reported a range of approaches and intervention...

ABSTRACT Introduction: The hemodialysis patients face with multiple physical problems and psychosocial and social challenges. The proper interventions in the field of their education have a positive impact on the reduction of complications and improvement of the quality of their life. Despite the potential benefits of patient education, its success depends on various factors. The...

OBJECTIVE To assess factors that might affect patient use of insulin pens. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Patients (n = 600: 300 using vial and syringe and 300 using pen) were recruited from national panels to participate in computer-assisted telephone interviews. Measures included: demographic characteristics; diabetes treatment and self-care factors; perceptions of pen convenience, clinical ef...

Video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) for resectable lung cancer patients has been frequently used in the past decades. The potential beneficial advantages and safety of VATS has been shown in large patient series and meta-analyses. The strategy of limiting access to one incision in one intercostal space (uniportal VATS) has been adopted by some thoracic surgeons in recent years. We have ...

Virtual human (VH) experiences are increasingly used for training interpersonal skills such as military leadership, classroom education, and doctor-patient interviews. These diverse applications of conversational VHs have a common and unexplored thread – a significant additional population would be afforded interpersonal skills training if VHs were available to simulate either interaction partn...

BACKGROUND Pharmacy-managed warfarin dosing has been established at Burnaby Hospital, in Burnaby, British Columbia, for over 10 years. With increases in the number and acuity of patients enrolled, it has become challenging to maintain a successful anticoagulation program. The clinical pharmacy support assistant (CPSA) program was initiated to support the provision of clinical pharmacy services....

Monitoring of patient-ventilator interactions at the bedside involves evaluation of patient breathing pattern on ventilator settings. One goal of mechanical ventilation is to have ventilator-assisted breathing coincide with patient breathing. The objectives of this goal are to have patient breath initiation result in ventilator triggering without undue patient effort, to match assisted-breath d...

The interaction of radiation with cells and tissues has a random nature. Therefore, understanding the random nature of cell killing that is determined by Poisson distribution statistics is an essential point in education of radiation biology. RadBioStat is a newly developed educational MATLAB-based software designed for computer-assisted learning of the target theory in radiation biology. Altho...