Journal of evaluation in clinical practice
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The prenatal education promotes the empowerment of parents during pregnancy and postnatal period. This study aimed to assess the quality of educational sessions held in the third trimester of pregnancy as part of the parenting education programme for Spanish National Health System in Madrid. ⋯ No jobs found with which to compare. The assessment of the programme with adequate psychometric characteristics questionnaire allows designing strategies and research to improve the quality of prenatal education.
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This study aimed to determine if urologists' feelings on prostate cancer screening with prostate-specific antigen (PSA) and treatment on themselves are consistent with what they recommend to patients. ⋯ Despite recommendations from the American Urologic Association to screen men for prostate cancer, a significant percentage of urologists do not wish to be screened with PSA. Almost all, however, continue to recommend prostate cancer screening for their patients. Treatment recommendations also varied among the respondents.
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Observational Study
Intensive care unit readmission prevention checklist: is it worth the effort?
Checklists have been adopted by various institutions to improve patient outcomes. In particular, readmission prevention checklists may be of potential value to improve patient care and reduce medical costs. As a result, a prior quality improvement study was conducted to create an intensive care unit readmission prevention checklist. The previous pilot demonstrated zero readmissions when the readmission prevention checklist was utilized but yielded low compliance (30%). Thus, a subsequent quality initiative was undertaken to refine the readmission prevention checklist with the primary aim of improved compliance while maintaining a reduced readmission rate that was observed with the original quality improvement study. ⋯ In conclusion, the findings of the current quality improvement study may serve to rethink the process of health care delivery that applies paper tools in an electronic medical environment.
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Pressure ulcers (PUs) are a common and serious complication in critically ill patients. The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between the development of a PU and hospital mortality in patients requiring mechanical ventilation (MV) in an intensive care unit (ICU). ⋯ Within the limitations of a single-centre approach, PU development appears to be associated with an increase in mortality among patients requiring MV for 24 hours or longer.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Experimental studies to improve the reliability and validity of regulatory judgments on health care in the Netherlands: a randomized controlled trial and before and after case study.
We examined the effect of two interventions on both the reliability and validity of regulatory judgments: adjusting the regulatory instrument and attending a consensus meeting. ⋯ Participating in a consensus meeting improved reliability and validity. Increasing the number of inspectors resulted in both higher reliability and validity values. Organizing consensus meetings and increasing the number of inspectors per regulatory visit seem to be valuable interventions for improving regulatory judgments.