BMJ open
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Review
Rapid realist review of the role of community pharmacy in the public health response to COVID-19.
Community pharmacists and their teams have remained accessible to the public providing essential services despite immense pressures during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have successfully expanded the influenza vaccination programme and are now supporting the delivery of the COVID-19 vaccination roll-out. ⋯ Community pharmacy has been able to offer key services during the pandemic. Decision makers must endorse, articulate and support a clear public health role for community pharmacy. We provide key recommendations for decision makers to optimise such a role during these unprecedented times and in the future.
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Chronic pain is highly prevalent and associated with a large burden of illness; there is a pressing need for safe, home-based, non-pharmacological, interventions. Virtual reality (VR) is a digital therapeutic known to be effective for acute pain, but its role in chronic pain is not yet fully elucidated. Here we present a protocol for the National Institute of Health (NIH) Back Pain Consortium (BACPAC) VR trial that evaluates the effectiveness of three forms of VR for patients with chronic lower back pain (cLBP), a highly prevalent form of chronic pain. ⋯ Ethics approval was obtained from the Institutional Review Board of Cedars-Sinai Health System in April 2020. The results will be disseminated in a peer-reviewed journal.
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This study aimed to develop and validate a new Learning Behaviour Questionnaire (LBQ) for the undergraduate nursing students. ⋯ The validity and reliability of the LBQ were satisfying. The LBQ is a short, well-developed questionnaire that can serve as a generic assessment tool for measuring learning behaviour for Chinese undergraduate nursing students.Cite Now.
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During the influenza epidemic season, the fragile elderlies are not only susceptible to influenza infections, but are also more likely to develop severe symptoms and syndromes. Such circumstances may pose a significant burden to the medical resources especially in the emergency department (ED). Disposition of the elderly patients with influenza infections to either the ward or intensive care unit (ICU) accurately is therefore a crucial issue. ⋯ The high specificity of NEWS ≥8 to predict ICU admission in elderly patients with influenza infection during the epidemic season may avoid unnecessary ICU admissions and ensure proper medical resource allocation.
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The ERAS protocol (Enhanced Recovery After Surgery) is a multimodal pathway aimed to reduce surgical stress and to allow a rapid postoperative recovery. Application of the ERAS protocol to colorectal cancer surgery has been limited to a minority of hospitals in Italy. To promote the systematic adoption of ERAS in the entire regional hospital network in Piemonte an Audit and Feedback approach (A&F) has been adopted together with a cluster randomised trial to estimate the true impact of the protocol on a large, unselected population. ⋯ The study protocol has been approved by the Ethical Committee of the coordinating centre and by all participating centres. Study results will be timely circulated within the hospital network and published in peer-reviewed journals.