INTRODUCTION The Emergency Severity Index (ESI) is an initial measure of patient assessment in the emergency department (ED). It rates patients based on acuity and predicted resource intensity from Level 1 (most ill) to Level 5 (least resource intensive). Already implemented and evaluated in several US hospitals, ESI has yet to be evaluated in a Canadian setting or compared with the five-level ...

The Addiction Severity Index--Multimedia Version (ASI-MV) is a CD-ROM-based simulation of the interviewer-administered Addiction Severity Index (ASI). Clients in treatment (N = 202) self-administered the ASI-MV to examine the test-retest reliability, criterion validity, and convergent-discriminant validity of the ASI-MV. Excellent test-retest reliability was observed for composite scores and se...

This article reports findings from a study that investigated treatment outcomes among crack/cocaine users over a 18-month period. From a cohort of 229 subjects, three groups emerged: (1) those who had reported ongoing, stable abstinence from crack/cocaine; (2) those who had consistently used during the period; and (3) those who reported cycling between abstinence and use during the follow-up pe...

Objectives. To evaluate if cumulative weight exposure is associated with weight loss strategy choices and weight loss success. Methods. Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey were used; a total of 4,562 people age 50 years or older who reported trying to lose weight in the last year were studied. Cumulative weight exposure (CWE) score was defined as the sum of body mass ...

This paper presents a method for analyzing oral examinations with an extended, many-faceted Rasch model that calibrates medical specialty candidates, protocols, and raters. Significant variance was found among protocol difficulties and rater severities. When candidates' raw scores were compared with calibrated measures corrected for the bias caused by the particular protocols and raters encount...

Barriers to risk factor control may differ by race/ethnicity. The goal of this study was to identify barriers to stroke awareness and risk factor management unique to Hispanics as compared to non-Hispanic whites (NHWs). We performed a prospective study of stroke patients from an academic Stroke Center in Arizona and surveyed members of the general community. Questionnaires included: the Duke So...

objective: most previous retrospective studies failed to show a consistent association between pre-hospital time intervals and mortality in trauma patients, bringing the recommendation of “transport fast to increase survival” under question. the aim of this study was to evaluate the association of response time, scene time, and transport time with 24-hour in-hospital mortality.   methods: in th...

drought is a gradual phenomenon and cause important changes in water resources, agriculture and so on. due to the stochastic behavior of factors that influence the occurrence and intense of drought, one can consider this phenomenon as a stochastic process. with respect to the importance of predicted drought severity and its vital influence in designing and operating water resources systems, thi...