BACKGROUND End-of-life care research across Africa is under-resourced and under-developed. A central issue in research in end-of-life care is the measurement of effects and outcomes of care on patients and families. Little is known about the experiences of health professionals' selection and implementation of outcome measures (OM) in clinical care, research, audit, or teaching in Africa. METH...

Day surgery has began in Portugal around the 90 decade of last century. Although publishing some documents and guidelines [1], the Portuguese Government had never define clear health policies in order to develop day surgery programmes. On the contrary, all the legislation and financing regulations published were restrictive and non-competitive from the ambulatory surgery point of view. In fact,...

Method From January 1990 to June 2001, 40 patients were studied. Those who had the complete cineangiocardiographic study prior to the first surgical intervention were included in the study. The morphometric characteristics of the central pulmonary arteries (PPAA) and aortopulmonary collateral arteries (APCA) were analyzed, as was the distribution of blood irrigation to the lungs. The following ...

Bulletin | J U N E Q Ua r t E r 2012 I have not spoken publicly on payments system matters for some time, but it would be hard to find a better moment and a more appropriate event to take up the issue once more. This symposium of course marks 20 years of the Australian Payments Clearing Association (APCA) , which was set up as a vehicle to coordinate decision-making in relation to clearing and ...

BACKGROUND Despite the burden of progressive incurable disease in Africa, there is almost no evidence on patient care or outcomes. A primary reason has been the lack of appropriate locally-validated outcome tools. This study aimed to validate a multidimensional scale (the APCA African Palliative Outcome Scale) in a multi-centred international study. METHODS Validation was conducted across 5 A...

and Applied Analysis 3 can identify segments of variable length. Also, the APCA algorithm is able to produce high quality approximations of a time series by resorting to solutions adopted in the wavelet domain. In SAX method, dimensionality of original time series is first reduced by applying PAA, then the PAA coefficients are quantized, and finally each quantization level is represented by a s...

OBJECTIVES This study aimed to measure the magnitude of palliative care needs among hospital inpatients. Objectives were to: (1) determine the point prevalence of inpatients with active life-limiting disease and (2) describe multidimensional need for palliative care among these patients. METHODS The study was a hospital inpatient census in Uganda. Patient notes were surveyed and those patient...