OBJECTIVES To examine the clinical and cost-effectiveness of brief advice for excessive alcohol consumption among people who attend sexual health clinics. METHODS Two-arm, parallel group, assessor blind, pragmatic, randomised controlled trial. 802 people aged 19 years or over who attended one of three sexual health clinics and were drinking excessively were randomised to either brief advice o...

OBJECTIVE To determine the feasibility of a randomised controlled trial (RCT) of rhinothermy for the common cold. DESIGN Open label, randomised, controlled feasibility study. SETTING Single-centre research institute in New Zealand recruiting participants from the community. PARTICIPANTS 30 adult participants with symptoms of a common cold, presenting within 48 hours of the onset of sympto...

BACKGROUND frailty is a state of vulnerability to stressor events. There is uncertainty about the beneficial effects of exercise interventions for older people with frailty. The Home-based Older People's Exercise (HOPE) programme is a 12-week-exercise intervention for older people with frailty designed to improve mobility and function. METHODS we tested feasibility of the HOPE programme in a ...

Introduction Several methods have been developed to electronically monitor patients for severe sepsis, but few provide predictive capabilities to enable early intervention; furthermore, no severe sepsis prediction systems have been previously validated in a randomised study. We tested the use of a machine learning-based severe sepsis prediction system for reductions in average length of stay an...

Title: The Hall Technique; a randomised control clinical trial of a novel method of managing carious primary molars in general dental practice: outcomes at two years. 1 The following are the authors responses (in blue), to the comments made by the referees. In order to fully understand the referees comments, and the authors responses to them, it should be noted that this paper was originally su...

BACKGROUND Process evaluations are useful for understanding how interventions are implemented in trial settings. This is important for interpreting main trial results and indicating how the intervention might function beyond the trial. The purpose of this study was to examine the reach, dose, fidelity, acceptability, and sustainability of the implementation of an educational hand washing interv...

BACKGROUND There has been an increased drive towards Evidence Based Policing in recent years. Unlike in other public sector services, such as health and education, randomised controlled trials in the police setting are relatively rare. This paper discusses some of the methodological and practical challenges of conducting a randomised controlled trial in the police setting in the UK, based on ou...

BACKGROUND Survival after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is closely linked to the quality of CPR, but in real life, resuscitation during prehospital care and ambulance transport is often suboptimal. Mechanical chest compression devices deliver consistent chest compressions, are not prone to fatigue and could potentially overcome some of the limitations of manual chest compression. However, ther...

BACKGROUND Maternal weight and maternal weight gain during pregnancy exert a significant influence on infant birth weight and the incidence of macrosomia. Fetal macrosomia is associated with an increase in both adverse obstetric and neonatal outcome, and also confers a future risk of childhood obesity. Studies have shown that a low glycaemic diet is associated with lower birth weights, however ...