While substantial evidence exists identifying risks factors associated with premature weaning from breastfeeding, there are no previously published definitions of patient acuity in the lactation field. This article defines evidence-based levels of lactation acuity based on maternal and infant characteristics. Patient acuity, matching severity of illness to intensity of care required, is an impo...

OBJECTIVE Measure RNs' and nursing assistants' reports of frequency and reasons for missed nursing care and identify factors related to successful delegation. BACKGROUND Routine nursing tasks were identified as the most commonly occurring omissions. Reasons for omissions included poor utilization of staff resources, time required for the nursing interventions, poor teamwork, ineffective deleg...

INTRODUCTION Mid-level providers (MLP) are extensively used in staffing emergency departments (ED). We sought to compare the productivity of MLPs staffing a low-acuity and high-acuity area of a community ED. METHODS This is a retrospective review of MLP productivity at a single center 42,000-volume community ED from July 2009 to September 2010. MLPs staffed day shifts (8AM-6PM or 10AM-10PM) i...

STUDY OBJECTIVE Emergency departments (EDs) with both low- and high-acuity treatment areas often have fixed allocation of resources, regardless of demand. We demonstrate the utility of discrete-event simulation to evaluate flexible partitioning between low- and high-acuity ED areas to identify the best operational strategy for subsequent implementation. METHODS A discrete-event simulation was...

STUDY OBJECTIVE A previous single-region study has suggested that acuity varies by patient age in ways that may affect subspecialty critical care skills retention. This study seeks to independently confirm or refute these findings by using the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS), a large nationally representative database of emergency department (ED) visits. METHODS Usin...

Problem definition: We study the estimation of probability distribution individual patient waiting times in an emergency department (ED). Whereas it is known that waiting-time estimates can help improve patients’ overall satisfaction and prevent abandonment, existing methods focus on point forecasts, thereby completely ignoring underlying uncertainty. Communicating only a forecast to patients b...

purpose : to compare visual quality in patients receiving alcon acrysof restor multifocal versus acrysof sa60at monofocal intraocular lenses (iol) methods : in this interventional study, patients with senile cataract undergoing surgery were enrolled. the age of the patients ranged between 40 and 85 years, and their potential preoperative vision was 20/30 or better. in all patients phacoemulsifi...