Journal of evaluation in clinical practice
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In several countries, collaborative improvement programmes involving multiple health care organizations have been developed to address the issue of patient safety and reliability of care at an organization-wide level. In the UK, the Health Foundation's Safer Patients Initiative (SPI) was developed to achieve breakthrough improvement in the quality and safety of care in 24 acute hospital Trusts between 2004 and 2008. Research evidence for the effectiveness of programmes of this type and the mechanisms by which positive outcomes are achieved remains limited. We report a multi-method preliminary study based upon phase 1 of SPI to understand participant's perceptions of the local impact of the programme and to form the basis of future research in this area. ⋯ Study findings support the view that programmes such as SPI have considerable impact upon the cultural, inter-professional, strategic and organizational aspects of care delivery, in addition to clinical working practices. The specific implications for understanding the effects of complex organization-level interventions and future research design are discussed.
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Long-term post-hospital survival of intensive care cohorts has been poorly characterized. The relative survival of septic and non-septic intensive care and general hospital patient cohorts, compared with the Australian population, was determined. ⋯ Adverse long-term survival of intensive care and hospital patients was demonstrated. For hospital patients there was additional infection-related mortality risk, not evident for ICU patients after case mix control.
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Although symptoms of anxiety and depression correlate, they may covary in irregular and unpredictable ways. This non-linear covariation may be important to psychiatric diagnosis, treatment and relapse. This non-linear anxiety-depression interaction suggests that power laws may be observed. Power laws are statistical distributions found when systems vary in complex ways at the interface between chaotic dynamics and periodic dynamics, such that data points vary randomly but are still partially correlated with each other. Such non-linear dynamics and relationships should result in characteristic patterns of interaction among patients, stressors and treatment. This is important because non-linear dynamics could affect our understanding of mental disorders, the need for varied treatment approaches and patterns of early response to treatment. ⋯ First, power laws suggest a scale-free relationship; the differences seen in transition from symptom level to change level may reflect that complex events at the level of mood assessment affect change in mood. Second, this covariation may be due to external factors acting on the patient or multiple internal interrelated factors. Third, different factors and populations can yield different slopes. Future research is needed to confirm these preliminary findings and to understand the origin of these dynamics.
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Inadequate surgical implantation of a hip replacement may result in decreased patient satisfaction and reduced implant survival. The objective was to monitor surgical performance in hip replacement. ⋯ This study has demonstrated that implementing a dedicated system to monitor surgical performance in a teaching hospital improves the quality of implantation of total hip replacements. Nonetheless, the target of ninety percent of adequate primary total hip replacement could not be reached and efforts should be continued.
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The purpose of this paper is to argue the importance of contemporary analysis of the modern social construction of chronicity--encapsulating the world views of the chronically ill, and the medical and health system constructions of chronic disease, through the nature of care for chronic conditions. It is argued that chronic diseases are themselves, socially constructed, despite widely accepted disease classification systems. Thus, there is a need to examine how different ideas have permeated our clinical and health system developments and their social context and vice versa. ⋯ Health care systems cannot afford to avoid, and should actively embrace the critiques of social theory and analyses in the transformations of health systems to improve chronic care. Creative tensions between empirical and intellectual critique, and a synthetic middle ground are likely to lead to more realistic and innovative approaches spanning the nature of chronicity and the transformation of Primary Care.