J Psychosoc Nurs Men
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Handover is a tradition in mental health settings and can occupy a significant amount of time each day, yet the topic has commanded limited attention in the psychiatric literature. Increasing staff changes and growing reliance on casual staff has heightened the need for the effective and efficient transfer of essential information, as staff will often find themselves in settings with unfamiliar patients. In this context, effective and timely handovers are crucial. ⋯ To reduce information loss and increase accuracy, verbal handover could be supplemented with computer-generated patient data. This combination will ensure face-to-face interaction remains and perhaps decrease time spent unproductively. Further research is necessary to evaluate such a handover system.
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J Psychosoc Nurs Men · Jun 2008
ReviewUnderstanding the placebo effect. Part 2: underlying psychological & neurobiological processes.
Placebo and nocebo effects are interesting and complex phenomena. In this article, I discuss some findings about the psychological and neurobiological processes that may underlie these effects on the basis of studies of pain, Parkinson's disease, and depression. ⋯ These brain circuits may represent a fundamentally important common underlying pathway that mediates placebo and nocebo effects in many conditions. Understanding these effects is important for designing clinical treatment studies and interpreting their results and is highly relevant for clinical practices.
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J Psychosoc Nurs Men · Mar 2008
ReviewHow are drugs approved? Part 3. The stages of drug development.
The first article of this series on the drug development process described the historical evolution of the U. S. ⋯ This drug development process involves the FDA, pharmaceutical companies (sponsors), clinical investigators, and institutional review boards. This article further describes this aspect of the drug development process.
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J Psychosoc Nurs Men · Jan 2008
ReviewHow are drugs approved? Part 1: the evolution of the Food and Drug Administration.
The discovery, development, and marketing of drugs for clinical use is a process that is complex, arduous, expensive, highly regulated, often criticized, and sometimes controversial. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the governmental agency responsible for regulating the development and marketing of drugs, medical devices, biologics, foods, cosmetics, radiation-emitting electronic devices, and veterinary products, with the objective of ensuring their safety and efficacy. As part of a broad overview of the drug development process, this article will describe the historical evolution of the FDA. This will provide background for two subsequent articles in this series, which will describe the ethical foundations of clinical research and hethe stages of drug development.