Journal of epidemiology and community health
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J Epidemiol Community Health · Dec 1995
Stress, social support, and stopping smoking after myocardial infarction in England.
To examine the effect on mortality of stopping smoking after myocardial infarction and the psychosocial factors that influence the decision to stop. ⋯ Smoking cessation can halve the smokers' odds of dying after myocardial infarction and psychosocial factors play a small but important role in the important decision to stop smoking. Health professionals should continue to stress the importance of stopping smoking to all patients as there is little evidence to support specific directing of advice to relatively "stress or "socially isolated" groups.
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J Epidemiol Community Health · Dec 1995
Neonatal intensive care cots: estimating the population based requirement in Trent, UK.
To estimate the population based requirement for neonatal intensive care (NIC) cots by investigating NIC utilisation in a large population based study. ⋯ Trent RHA is reasonably representative of the greater population of England and Wales in terms of both the distribution of birth weight and of birth weight-specific neonatal mortality. Trent RHA did not seen to be underprovided for NIC cots or to be overusing these cots inappropriately. It therefore seems reasonable, if the assumptions of the analysis are borne carefully in mind, to treat these utilisation data as a rough guide to true population based need. NIC cot requirements depend critically upon the size of the served population - small populations are subject to greater random variability and require relatively more cots to ensure cot availability on an equivalent proportion of days. A neonatal unit should not therefore serve a population generating fewer than 5000 and 25 000 births per annum, the estimated population based provision which would ensure free cots on 29 out of 30 days falls gradually from 1.20 to 0.88 NIC cots per 1000 births per annum. A cooperative network of NICUs offers the opportunity to provide fewer cots per head of population while maintaining good access for most neonates referred to the service.