INTRODUCTION Caring for the critically ill is a 24-hour-a-day responsibility, but not all resources and staff are available during off hours. We evaluated whether intensive care unit (ICU) admission during off hours affects hospital mortality. METHODS This retrospective multicentre cohort study was carried out in three non-academic teaching hospitals in the Netherlands. All consecutive patien...

BACKGROUND Insulin resistance is associated with ischaemic heart disease and has been proposed as a risk factor for subsequent myocardial infarction. AIM To investigate the potential use of a recently proposed insulin resistance index in identifying insulin resistance in patients admitted with an acute coronary syndrome. METHODS Single centre study of 441 non-diabetic patients admitted with...

OBJECTIVE To assess the effectiveness of acute geriatric units compared with conventional care units in adults aged 65 or more admitted to hospital for acute medical disorders. DESIGN Systematic review and meta-analysis. DATA SOURCES Medline, Embase, and the Cochrane Library up to 31 August 2008, and references from published literature. Review methods Randomised trials, non-randomised tria...

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a metaphorical concept to describe the self-documented addition of technical debt software project in form source code comments. SATD can linger projects and degrade source-code quality, but it also be more visible than unintentionally added or undocumented debt. Understanding implications adding important because developers benefit from better understandi...

OBJECTIVE To identify intensive care patients dying within 2 years of discharge from hospital and assess whether the cause of death was related to the diagnosis at hospital discharge. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS A retrospective cohort study of all patients admitted to the intensive care unit at Wellington Hospital, New Zealand, between 1 July 2001 and 30 June 2003, using data from the IC...