INTRODUCTION One of the most striking developments in twentieth-century medicine has been the growing involvement of laboratory science in day-to-day medical practice. Not only are scientific laboratories employed extensively in the diagnosis and investigation of illness, but it is now commonplace to regard doctors as, in many ways, applied scientists. This is a far cry from the situation at th...

BACKGROUND Casemix adjusted in-hospital mortality is one of the measures used to improve quality of care. The adjustment currently used does not take into account the effects of readmission, because reliable data on readmission is not readily available through routinely collected databases. We have studied the impact of readmissions by linking admissions of the same patient, and as a result wer...

INTRODUCTION The sources of racial disparity in duration of patients' visits to emergency departments (EDs) have not been documented well enough for policymakers to distinguish patient-related factors from hospital- or area-related factors. This study explores the racial disparity in duration of routine visits to EDs at teaching and non-teaching hospitals. METHODS We performed retrospective d...

BACKGROUND Brief intervention is effective for alcohol misuse, but not adequately tested in the clinical setting with drug using patients. This study tested the impact of a single, structured encounter targeting cessation of drug use, conducted between peer educators and out-of-treatment cocaine and heroin users screened in the context of a routine medical visit. METHODS A randomized, control...

OBJECTIVE To determine the patient and hospital characteristics associated with severe manifestations of 'poor glycemic control'-a 'no-pay' hospital-acquired condition defined by the US Medicare program based on hospital claims related to severe complications of diabetes. DESIGN A nested case-control study. SETTING California acute care hospitals from 2005 to 2006. PARTICIPANTS All cases ...

AIM The quality of services plays a primary role in achieving patient satisfaction. The main purpose of this study was to explore the effect of outpatient service quality on patient satisfaction in teaching hospitals in Iran. METHODS this cross-sectional study was conducted in 2014. The study sample included 500 patients were selected with systematic random method from the outpatient departme...

RATIONALE, AIMS AND OBJECTIVES Explicit attention to patient safety during surgical training is needed to improve patient safety. A positive safety climate is associated with greater patient safety and is a requisite for safety teaching at the workplace. The Safety Climate Survey (SCS) measures perceptions of safety climate. This study aims to take a first step in validating the SCS for use amo...

This article employs a quasi-experimental, pre/post comparison group design to determine whether rural hospital closures (n = 11) have had a detrimental impact on access to inpatient and outpatient care for the Medicare population. Closure areas experienced a significant decrease in medical admissions, although admission rates remained higher than in comparison areas. Physician services were no...

study the performance of nurses communication with patients in special education and non- teaching hospital, urmia     hemmati maslakpak m [1] * , sheikhbaklu m [2] , baghaei r [3] , sheikhi n [4]     received: 21 dec, 2011 accepted: 4 feb, 2012     abstract   background & aims : acceptable communication performance is essential for safe, effective, and suitable care . proper communication is e...

Psychosocial factors play an important role in the clinical practice in the general hospital. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the relevance assigned by non psychiatry physicians who work in a teaching general hospital, to psychosocial factors in the context of their day-to-day clinical practice, and the coping strategies they adopt to deal with them. A second objective is to ass...