Frank Marble, among the nation’s preeminent aerospace propulsion scientists during the second half of the 20th century, has passed away at the age of 96. His pioneering technical contributions changed the direction of several important fields that are foundational to both aircraft and rocket systems. However, quite possibly, Frank Marble made even greater contributions to aerospace engineering ...

Two purposes of Short Stay Units (SSU) are the reduction of Emergency Department crowding and increased urgent patient admissions. At an SSU urgent patients are temporarily held until they either can go home or transferred to an inpatient ward. In this paper we present an overflow model to evaluate the effect of employing an SSU on elective and urgent patient admissions. © 2015 The Authors. Pub...

BACKGROUND Pain experienced by children in emergency departments (EDs) is often poorly assessed and treated. Although local protocols and strategies are important to ensure appropriate staff behaviours, few studies have focussed on pain management policies at hospital or department level. This study aimed at describing the policies and reported practices of pain assessment and treatment in a na...

Access to health care While competition may yield efficiency gains there is always a danger that without safeguards these will be achieved at the expense of a loss of equity. Services offering clear revenue earning potential will become more attractive. Many health promotion and screening services-primarily aimed at the affluent, worried well-are likely to fall into this category. Similarly, it...

BACKGROUND In the United Kingdom there has been a long term pattern of increases in children's emergency admissions and a substantial increase in short stay unplanned admissions. The emergency admission rate (EAR) per thousand population for breathing difficulty, feverish illness and diarrhoea varies substantially between children living in different Primary Care Trusts (PCTs). However, there h...

OBJECTIVE To determine the safety of a relatively brief (<3-hour) period of postoperative observation prior to discharge in children undergoing outpatient tonsillectomy. DESIGN Retrospective chart review. SETTING Tertiary care children's hospital and public teaching hospital. PATIENTS The records of all patients (12 years of age who underwent tonsillectomy or adenotonsillectomy from Novem...

OBJECTIVES Despite the increasing utilization of in-home services, the assessment of in-home services used by those that have certified levels of care needs has been limited to the actual changes in individual outcomes. The purpose of the present study was to determine factors affecting how the utilization of in-home services could have sustained and/or improved or deteriorated the care needs l...

OBJECTIVE We evaluated the usefulness of a short stay or 23-hour ward in a pediatric unit of a large teaching hospital, Westmead Hospital, and an academic Children's hospital, The New Children's Hospital, to determine if they are a useful addition to the emergency service. METHODS This is a descriptive comparison of prospectively collected data on all children admitted to the short stay ward ...

BACKGROUND Timely care by general practitioners in the community keeps children out of hospital and provides better continuity of care. Yet in the UK, access to primary care has diminished since 2004 when changes in general practitioners' contracts enabled them to 'opt out' of providing out-of-hours care and since then unplanned pediatric hospital admission rates have escalated, particularly th...