BACKGROUND Pharmacological intervention is essential for managing the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Adherence to medication regimens however is a major problem. Poor adherence leads to significant motor deterioration and inadequate symptom control. This results in poor quality of life. Whilst interventions to improve medication adherence have shown considerable benefit in other chronic condi...

BACKGROUND The purpose of the study was to explore the association between post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and work performance of emergency medical services personnel in Karachi, Pakistan. METHODS Emergency medical service personnel were screened for potential PTSD using Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R). Work performance was assessed on the basis of five variables: number of late ...

BACKGROUND The objectives are to compare the effectiveness of cell phone-supported SMS messaging to standard care on adherence, quality of life, retention, and mortality in a population receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Nairobi, Kenya. METHODS AND DESIGN A multi-site randomized controlled open-label trial. A central randomization centre provided opaque envelopes to allocate treatments...

Abstract Aim Indications for blood tests are often poorly considered. Appropriate requests reduce trauma patients, improve laboratory workflow and costs. We therefore created a novel protocol bloods requested in the post-operative period patients undergoing elective colorectal cancer resections. performed two audit cycle loops to assess adherence evaluate financial savings. Method The was agree...

Given the increasing emphasis on measuring quality indicators such as adherence to practice guidelines, we sought to determine the factors and address the barriers affecting guideline adherence on an academic inpatient hepatology service. We performed a single-center, prospective observational study. Physicians were given a handheld checklist to complete daily. We first measured the adherence r...

BACKGROUND The prophylactic use of antimicrobial agents to prevent infections in non-surgical situations has hardly been investigated. We investigate the extent, indications and appropriateness of antimicrobial prophylaxis given outside the operating room in a tertiary care hospital. METHODS Four point-prevalence surveys were conducted in which all inpatients on that day were screened for the...

BACKGROUND Bonafide psychotherapy is an effective treatment for generalised anxiety disorder compared to no-treatment. Rather than creating increasing numbers of new overall treatment-packets within a medical meta-model, an additional approach to investigating clinical research designs may be to increase the understanding of already effective psychotherapies. Treatment manuals and protocols all...

Current self-report medication adherence measures often provide heavily skewed results with limited variance, suggesting that most participants are highly adherent. This contrasts with findings from objective adherence measures. We argue that one of the main limitations of these self-report measures is the limited range covered by the behaviors assessed. That is, the items do not match the adhe...

Purpose. To investigate adherence to our pain protocol considering analgesics administration, number and timing of pain assessments, and adjustment of analgesics upon unacceptably high (NRS ≥ 4) and low (NRS ≤ 1) pain scores. Material and Methods. The pain protocol for patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) after cardiac surgery consisted of automated prescriptions for paracetamol and morphi...

PURPOSE To determine the degree of adherence to a cervical spine (c-spine) clearance protocol by pre-hospital Emergency Medical Services (EMS) personnel by both self-assessment and receiving hospital assessment, to describe deviations from the protocol, and to determine if the rate of compliance by paramedic self-assessment differed from receiving hospital assessment. METHODS A retrospective ...