INTRODUCTION The hands of a health care worker are a common vehicle of pathogen transmission in hospital settings. Health care worker hand hygiene is therefore critical for patients' well being. Whilst failure of health care workers to comply with the best hand hygiene practice is a problem in all health care settings, issues of lack of access to adequate cleaning equipment and in some cases ev...

In the last decades, Knowledge Management has gained momentum as an important tool for competitiveness of organizations. A number of Knowledge Management approaches are described in the literature. Some authors focus in particular on the importance of Knowledge Audit, first, as a start point for any Knowledge Management initiative, and second, as a regular base for the measurement of Knowledge ...

1 3 0 • H O S P I TA L P H A R M AC I S T Aseptic preparation of medicines in hospital pharmacy units usually comprises the combination of licensed sterile ingredients in a manner that will ensure that the resulting product, in its final container, is sterile. One of the inherent weaknesses of this activity is that aseptically prepared medicinal products cannot be tested for sterility as would ...

OBJECTIVES To describe the standards of care for stroke patients in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and to determine the power of national audit, coupled with an active dissemination strategy to effect change. DESIGN A national audit of organisational structure and retrospective case note audit, repeated within 18 months. Separate postal questionnaires were used to identify the types of c...

Computer Assisted Audit Techniques (CAATs) encompass a range of computerized techniques that internal and external auditors use to facilitate their audit objectives. One of the most important CAATs is generalized audit software (GAS), which is a class of packaged software that allows auditors to interrogate a variety of databases, application software and other sources and then conduct analyses...

AIM To investigate whether participation in a clinical audit and education session would improve GP management of patients who smoke. METHODS GPs who participated in an associated smoking cessation research program were invited to complete a three-stage clinical audit. This process included a retrospective self-audit of smoking cessation management practices over the 6 months prior to commenc...

OBJECTIVES To describe alcohol drinking patterns among participants in Katutura, Namibia, and to evaluate brief versions of the AUDIT against the full AUDIT to determine their effectiveness in detecting harmful drinking. METHODS A cross-sectional survey was conducted in four constituencies and 639 participants, 18 years or older, completed a sociodemographic survey and the AUDIT. The effectiv...

OBJECTIVES To use data from the 2001-2 National Stroke Audit to describe the organisation of stroke units in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and to see if key characteristics deemed effective from the research literature were present. DESIGN Data were collected as part of the National Sentinel Audit of Stroke in 2001, both on the organisation and structure of inpatient stroke care and th...

Lalloo et al. [1] are to be commended for undertaking further research on methods of auditing the process and outputs of occupational physicians’ reports, which usually take the form of correspondence with referring managers. To supplement their literature search, readers should be aware that your journal has published research regarding this issue in the past and occupational physicians’ repor...