An arrangement is described for manual workers of an oil refinery to certify their own short spells of sickness absence instead of obtaining a medical certificate. No serious abuse has been found, and these spells of absence are more evenly spread throughout the week than those certified by a doctor. This system can help to reduce both the work-load of practitioners and the lost time in industry.

BACKGROUND Accurate calculation of hospital length of stay (LOS) from the English Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) is important for a wide range of audit and research purposes. The two methodologies which are commonly used to achieve this differ in their accuracy and complexity. We compare these methods and make recommendations on when each is most appropriate. METHODS We calculated LOS usin...

OBJECTIVES Population ageing has been associated with an increase in comorbid chronic disease, functional dependence, disability and associated higher health care costs. Frailty Syndromes have been proposed as a way to define this group within older persons. We explore whether frailty syndromes are a reliable methodology to quantify clinically significant frailty within hospital settings, and m...

would have been expressed in fewer words! Another gentleman with true military fortiter in re friendship, told me my pamphlet was tit to line trunks with, reminding one of what O'Connell said to a writer, *'1 saw an excellent thing in your last essay !" " What was it ? what was it ?" eagerly cried Scriblerus. "It was a mutton pie," replied O'Connell!. I have therefore good reason to remember Lo...

S tudents often approach the familiar stories of the Bible wondering what more they can learn from texts they have been reading since childhood.As teachers, we face the challenge of getting students to focus on the text itself, without being overly influenced by the preconceptions and interpretations that have become attached to these stories through centuries of retelling and commentary. One d...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the Bedtime Pass Program (BPP), an extinction-based procedure for treating bedtime resistance in typically developing children. METHODS A randomized, controlled trial in which nineteen 3- to 6-year-old children demonstrating bedtime resistance were randomly assigned to a Bedtime Pass or Monitoring Control group. The experimental condition involved parent monitoring plus ...

O mundo empresarial é repleto de situações complexas e inovadoras. Diante disso, muitos empresários buscam meios para se adequar às diversas normas impostas pela regulamentação civil comercial. Nesse contexto nasceu a necessidade criação uma empresa, que orientasse desse sequência aos objetivos da firma, como forma proteção dos bens conquistados no decorrer décadas. Para tanto, observando as ne...

OBJECTIVES The aim was to study whether a workplace-registered frequent short-term sick leave spell pattern was an early indicator of future disability pension or future long-term sick leave among municipal eldercare workers. SETTING The municipal healthcare sector in the city of Aarhus, which is the second largest city in Denmark. PARTICIPANTS All elder care employees who worked the entire...

OBJECTIVE To investigate effects of cold weather spells on incidence of cardiovascular disease (CVD), and potential effect modification of socio-demographic, clinical, behavioural and environmental exposures. METHODS Data from two prospective studies were analysed: the British Regional Heart Study (BRHS), a population-based study of British men aged 60-79years, followed for CVD incidence from...

Despite the potential for the State Children's Health Insurance Program to improve the health care coverage of rural children, the expansion of public health insurance to children in rural areas may be hampered by a lack of understanding about the patterns of insurance coverage they experience. This study uses the Census Bureau's 1993-1996 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation...