Effectiveness and Comparative Effectiveness Reviews, systematic reviews of existing research on the effectiveness, comparative effectiveness, and comparative harms of different health care interventions, are intended to provide relevant evidence to inform real-world health care decisions for patients, providers, and policymakers. In an effort to improve the transparency, consistency, and scient...

Medical practice is rooted in our dependence on the best available evidence from incremental scientific experimentation and rigorous clinical trials. Progress toward determining the true worth of ongoing practice or suggested innovations can be glacially slow when we insist on following the stepwise scientific pathway, and a prevailing but imperfect paradigm often proves difficult to challenge....

This is an experience developed during the Master program in Nursing at UFSC. It aimed to reflect on the nursing care delivered to the patient unable to verbally communicate, based on Paterson and Zderad's Theory and to analyze the communicational process between nursing and client. The experience was carried out in the Intensive Care Center of a private hospital in two stages: non-participatin...

This bibliographic study analyzes scientific texts published in the CEPEn database in the mental health field (1979-2007). A total of 280 abstracts were investigated, of which 208 were Master's theses. The individuals investigated in these studies were professionals (57), patients (50), and professors and/or students (18). Among the themes addressed between 2000 and 2007 were the following: Nur...

To translate scientific discovery into improved health, we must study health care itself; i.e., how people access health care, costs or other barriers to the provision of good care, and what happens to patients as a result of this care. Health services research (HSR) is the interdisciplinary field that studies health care and its effects. This paper reviews different types of HSR and highlights...

The vision of the future health care should be a system in which patient care is consistently improved through the use of information on the individual patient's genomes and their downstream products. This requires the exploration of strategic relationships among various disciplines such as life sciences, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and information and communication technology, and constel...

Pediatric intensive care is one of the areas of medicine which has developed the most in recent years all over the world. Brazilian critical care pediatricians have taken part in this scientific growth with ever increasing production. Their articles, books and conferences generate intense interest, not only among specialists, but also by pediatricians who in one way or another, when on call, in...

Downsizing, limited resources, and increasing costs provide challenges to the military health system. Variations in the diagnosis and treatment of dental disease add to the demands on the delivery system to provide access and ensure quality for uniformed personnel. Evidence-based dentistry is the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the c...

This discussion paper reflects on the pay-for-performance system in UK general practice - the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) - from an international viewpoint. The QOF intends to bring the best scientific evidence to bear on primary care practice. However, the QOF and patient-centred medicine are often at odds. Inadequacies and commercial bias in the creation of evidence make the scientif...