Journal of evaluation in clinical practice
-
We assessed patients on the waiting lists of a purposive sample of orthopaedic surgeons in Ontario, Canada, to determine patients' attitudes towards time waiting for hip or knee replacement. We focused on 148 patients who did not have a definite operative date, obtaining complete information on 124 (84%). Symptom severity was assessed with the Western Ontario/McMaster Osteoarthritis Index and a disease-specific standard gamble was used to elicit patients' overall utility for their arthritic state. ⋯ Utility values were independently but weakly associated with patients' tolerance of waiting times (adjusted R-square = 0.059, P = 0.004). After splitting the sample along the median into subgroups with a relatively 'low' and 'high' tolerance for waiting, the subgroup with the apparently lower tolerance for waiting reported lower utility scores (z = 2.951; P = 0.004) and shorter times since their surgeon first advised them of the need for surgery (z = 3.014; P = 0.003). These results suggest that, in the establishment and monitoring of a queue management system for quality-of-life-enhancing surgery, patients' own perceptions of their overall symptomatic burden and ability to tolerate delayed relief should be considered along with information derived from clinical judgements and pre-weighted health status instruments.
-
The aim of the present study was to examine the use of maternal weight measurements during antenatal care throughout the United Kingdom. A postal questionnaire and follow-up letter were sent to 1500 midwives throughout the United Kingdom, selected at random from the UKCC register. The postal survey achieved a response rate of 44.8% (672/1500 questionnaires), and obtained responses from at least 10 midwives in all but the lowest grade. ⋯ However, the criteria that midwives used for identifying 'abnormal' weight gain were variable, and often inappropriate, so that different midwives are unlikely to intervene consistently or to give consistent advice on the basis of maternal weight gain. These differences in practice may lead to extensive and inappropriate variation in antenatal care. Clear guidelines are urgently required to ensure that, if maternal weight measurements are collected during antenatal care, they are collected and used consistently.
-
When patient or family requests for continued life-sustaining treatments conflict with doctor recommendations, different conclusions as to what is beneficial for the patient may arise. Past practices usually accepted patient or family requests based on the principle of autonomy or that the doctor's primary responsibility is to the individual patient. Many patients die in intensive care units after doctors forego life-prolonging interventions. ⋯ Doctors have defined therapies as futile or non-beneficial based on their own values and even withdrawn life-sustaining treatments without patient or family input. In some cases, the right to die is leading to the duty to die even against patient or surrogate wishes. Such observations indicate the need for rigorous analyses of medical decision making in this context and for ethical evaluations in health care in general.
-
Editorial Review
Evidence-based medicine: reference? Dogma? Neologism? New orthodoxy?
-
If the relative effectiveness of different treatments that might be used in clinical practice is to be evaluated reliably, it is very important that the evaluation is carried out in an appropriate manner. This is especially true where the differences between treatments are expected to be moderate, and so easily obscured by the play of chance or systematic bias. Although such differences are often of considerable clinical importance, they can be difficult to assess and require a large amount of randomized evidence. ⋯ This approach requires considerable time and effort. However, it will add to the analyses that can be performed and will remove many of the problems associated with a reliance on published data alone and some of the problems that can arise from the use of aggregate data. This paper sets out some of the reasons for this and some of the techniques used for individual patient data-based meta-analysis.