The New Zealand medical journal
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This paper aims to inform the reader about the procedures of, and the need to run, a bequest programme for the teaching of clinical anatomy. It provides an overview of how the programme operates, and why the Department of Anatomy and Structural Biology at the University of Otago (Dunedin, New Zealand) requires cadavers (bodies). It also looks at the acceptance and restrictions of bequests, and the altruistic nature of those who bequeath themselves to the Department.
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Letter Case Reports
A rare cause of post-partum headache: cerebral tuberculomas.
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To evaluate the frequency and characteristics of preventable medication-related events in hospitalised children, to determine the yield of several methods for identifying them and to recommend priorities for prevention. ⋯ Preventable medication-related events occur commonly in the paediatric inpatient setting, and importantly over half of the events that caused patient harm were deemed preventable. Voluntary staff reporting in a quality improvement environment was found to be inferior to chart review for identifying events, but a vast improvement on the conventional incident reporting system. Most commonly implicated in the harmful or potentially harmful preventable events, and hence the best targets for prevention are dosing errors, particularly during the prescribing stage of the medication use process, and use of antibacterial agents, particularly when administered by the intravenous route.
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Physician seniority has increasingly been shown to correlate with improved clinical outcomes. However few studies examine the relationship between treating doctor experience and the efficiency of emergency care systems. We explored the hypothesis that increased seniority of emergency department (ED) medical staff would result in improved ED efficiency. ⋯ Increasing seniority of front line ED staff during a period of resident doctors' strike action was associated with increased efficiency of ED patient processing. Early specialist involvement with ED patients may replicate these efficiencies during periods of normal departmental operation.