Acute hyponatraemia is a common finding in patients with intracranial pathology. The diagnosis of the syndrome of inappropriate antidiuretic hormone (SIADH) is often made, but it is important to distinguish this from cerebral salt wasting syndrome, which responds to very different management. Cerebral salt wasting is well documented in neurosurgical patients and in patients with space occupying...

Students with disabilities who are served in restrictive educational settings often display inappropriate behavior that serves to preclude their integration into the mainstream. One approach to managing difficult behavior is a levels system (Smith & Farrell, 1993), which typically consists of a hierarchy of levels in which students must meet increasingly demanding standards of behavior before a...

OBJECTIVES Inappropriate prescription medication use can have significant consequences. Although it is suspected that Aboriginal populations within Canada have high rates of inappropriate use, published information is lacking. To better understand this issue, we studied an Aboriginal population seeking addiction treatment. METHODS We surveyed Aboriginal clients who accessed addiction treatmen...

The purpose of this experiment was to establish discriminative control of responding by an antecedent stimulus using differential punishment because the results of past studies on this topic have been mixed. Three adults with mental retardation who exhibited stereotypy not maintained by social consequences (i.e., automatic reinforcement) participated. For each subject, stereotypy occurred frequ...

OBJECTIVES To describe current use and possible effects of Australian medical school fitness-to-practise policies (FTPPs), and to define and benchmark FTPP best practice. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS A questionnaire-based study of Australian medical schools was conducted in August 2009. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Use of FTPPs by medical schools; criteria used in FTPPs; remediation processes;...

A quantitative microbial risk assessment was applied to evaluate the microbial risks of the Accra Urban Water System (AUWS). The exposure assessment was based on the count of indicator organisms in waste water from open roadside drains and in water and sand samples from the beach. The predicted total disease burden generated in a representative catchment of the AUWS (Odaw Catchment) was 36,329 ...

T wave oversensing (TWOS) is a common cause of inappropriate implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) therapies. Various algorithms to avoid inappropriate ICD therapy are available; however, they are not helpful to avoid TWOS. Although the reproduction of TWOS is useful to resolve the problem of TWOS, it is sometimes difficult to reproduce TWOS. We report two cases of inappropriate ICD ther...

Plasma antidiuretic hormone concentrations were measured in a group of children with acute asthma and in a control group. Very high levels of antidiuretic hormone were found in the asthmatic group. There were no changes in other biochemical indices. If overproduction of antidiuretic hormone is sustained then fluid administration to children with severe acute asthma is potentially dangerous.

BACKGROUND Junior doctors are at high risk of involvement in medication errors. Educational interventions to enhance human factors and specifically nontechnical skills in health care are increasingly reported, but there is no work in the context of prescribing improvement to guide such education. We set out to determine the elements that influence prescribing from a human factors perspective by...