Although medical schools take every precaution in selecting benevolent individuals to be trained as physicians, an international study has revealed that 5% of doctors worldwide have recurrent issues that warrant disciplinary action by medical boards. These issues include violations of professionalism, unethical behavior, negligence, and in some cases criminal intent, reflective of deficiencies ...

We conducted a prevalence study of current substance misuse amongst acute general medical admissions, and compared the sociodemographic profile of this group of patients with total admissions and the local catchment population. Patients were included in the study if they were resident in the Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham (LSL) Health Commission catchment area and were aged between 18 and 85 y...

Old-school pedagogues must be cringing. The Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) and panel interviews dispatched to the dustbins of medical school history? Spaces set aside for those trained in the humanities? Have the caretakers of all that is good and time-honoured in the hallowed halls of medical schools gone entirely mad? There is little doubt that the medical school admissions landscape ...

Consensus statement on diagnosis, investigation, treatment and prevention of acute bacterial meningitis in immunocompetent adults. British Infection Working Party. Review. J Infect 1999;39:1–15. 6 Whitley RJ, Gnann JW. Viral encephalitis: familiar infections and emerging pathogens. Review. Lancet 2002;359:507–13. 7 Friedman DI, Jacobson DM. Diagnostic criteria for idiopathic intracranial hypert...

DIRECT admission of patients from home is the predominant method of admission to geriatric medical units. Admission may take place as the result of a telephone consultation with the general practitioner or, in less urgent cases, following a domiciliary assessment visit by a member of the medical staff of the unit. However, in recent years the pattern of referral to hospitals in Belfast has chan...

This paper seeks to evaluate whether the adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) leads to upcoding for hospitalized Medicare patients, defined as categorizing a condition as more serious than justified in order to inflate bills, or more accurate coding. We use a triple difference: (1) between EMR and non-EMR hospitals; (2) before and after the 2007 Medicare payment reform, which made obta...

BACKGROUND The Rapid Acute Physiology Score (RAPS) and Rapid Emergency Medicine Score (REMS) are risk adjustment methods for emergency medical admissions developed for use in audit, research, and clinical practice. Each predicts in hospital mortality using four (RAPS) or six (REMS) variables that can be easily recorded at presentation. We aimed to evaluate the predictive value of REMS, RAPS, an...

PROBLEM Implicit white race preference has been associated with discrimination in the education, criminal justice, and health care systems and could impede the entry of African Americans into the medical profession, where they and other minorities remain underrepresented. Little is known about implicit racial bias in medical school admissions committees. APPROACH To measure implicit racial bi...