Gaceta sanitaria
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The objective of this study is to assess the contribution of job strain, according to the Karasek's demand-control model, on the job satisfaction and stress-related psychological symptoms in nurses and nurse aids of caring units of a public hospital of Barcelona, independently of other aspects of both the work and the outside of work environment. ⋯ This study shows the importance of job strain on the job satisfaction and stress-related psychological symptoms of this group of workers, even after adjusting by other variables of the work and of the outside of work environment. This finding underscores the importance of considering, jointly with the classical work hazards, those related with the psychosocial work environment in implementing strategies for improving health and welfare among nurses.
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Regional differences in hospital utilization have been long recognized. The objective of this study is to find out differences in hospital utilization and structure between Madrid and Catalonia. ⋯ We obtained the located and allocated beds, and the distribution of discharges by payers and of beds by providers for both regions, Catalonia shows consistently higher discharge rates (40% of public beds and 3.70 used beds) and Madrid has longer hospital stays (70% of public beds and 3.98 used beds). This work allows to formulate two questions about how health services operate: 1) organizational aspects could affect medical behavior. 2) hospital bed days could depend more on discharge rates than on length of stay.
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In order to explore the validity of official infant mortality statistics, the number of infant deaths registered in the cohort of live births and resident in Navarra (Spain) from 1985 to 1989, according to data supplied by the Department of Statistics of Navarra, has been compared with that obtained in a retrospective search into the information of the hospitals. Among 24,383 live births of the cohort, 291 were certified as infant deaths. ⋯ By excluding those live births with less than six months of gestation, as done by the National Institute of Statistics, the validity is altered, because apart from the errors mentioned, one must add those resulting from the incorrect filling-in of the "number of weeks pregnant"= variable. When correcting these deficiencies, the final statistics (Infant Mortality Risk = 11.17 per 1000 live births) did not differ much from the official figures (IMR = 11.48 per 1000 live births).