OBJECTIVES To quantify the extent of the variation in hospital admission rates between general practices, and to investigate whether this variation can be explained by factors relating to the patient, the hospital, and the general practice. DESIGN Cross sectional analysis of routine data. SETTING Merton, Sutton, and Wandsworth Health Authority, which includes areas of inner and outer London...

The objective was to examine the relationship between health care costs and quality in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Administrative claims were used to calculate 8 process measures for the treatment of RA. Associated health care costs were calculated for members who achieved or did not achieve each of the measures. Medical, pharmacy, and laboratory claims for RA patients (International Classificat...

There is no national mental health law in Germany: the 16 German states are responsible for legislation concerning forced admissions, while the German Civil Code covers non-acute care, in particular for those not able to care for themselves. In forensic psychiatry, both federal and state laws apply. This article describes this situation and provides figures about detentions and other aspects of...

INTRODUCTION Specific patient care measures and cost of hospitalization are being studied as health care providers and payers are seeking methods to improve the hospital care of patients. This study's purpose was to examine the length of stay and cost of inpatient care by a family medicine teaching service in comparison with the hospitalists' and community physicians' services in the same commu...

Many medical senior house officer rotations now change every four months. Thus senior house officers arrive on a new unit expected to manage complicated cases, handle specialist clinics, and explain details to patients when they have previously seen such problems only briefly as students. They generally rely on help and answers to their questions from middle grade staff and nurses. The pace of ...

BACKGROUND In many Emergency Department (ED) triage scoring systems, vital signs are not included as an assessment parameter. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the validity of a new protocol for Emergency Medicine in a large cohort of patients referred to in-hospital care. METHODS From January 1 to June 30, 2006, 22,934 patients were admitted to the ED at Sahlgrenska University Hospital. Of those, 869...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the performance of a routine incident reporting system in identifying patient safety incidents. DESIGN Two stage retrospective review of patients' case notes and analysis of data submitted to the routine incident reporting system on the same patients. SETTING A large NHS hospital in England. POPULATION 1006 hospital admissions between January and May 2004: surgery (n...

In previous work we introduced and studied a function R(a+, a−, c; v, v̂) that is a generalization of the hypergeometric function 2F1 and the Askey–Wilson polynomials. When the coupling vector c ∈ C is specialized to (b, 0, 0, 0), b ∈ C, we obtain a function R(a+, a−, b; v, 2v̂) that generalizes the conical function specialization of 2F1 and the q-Gegenbauer polynomials. The function R is the joi...