1,720,978 research outputs found
The effect of a rapid response system on patient outcomes in Belgian acute hospitals : redefining outcomes, investigating clinical impact, calculating predictive performance, and estimating optimal nurse staffing levels
No full textAbstract: Deterioration of hospitalised patients is often missed, misinterpreted, and mismanaged and can eventually result in death. Rapid response systems (RRSs) provide a framework to detect and interpret in-hospital clinical deterioration, to enhance communication between clinicians, and to initiate a response in a timely manner. The main goal of RRSs is to prevent progressing patient deterioration and subsequently to reduce preventable serious adverse events improving the quality of care. A considerable body of research exists studying different aspects and types of RRSs. However, the quality of evidence in relation to patient outcomes is poor and there is no consensus on what the most effective strategy is to prevent serious adverse events. The general aim of this doctoral study is to investigate the effect of a rapid response system on patient outcomes using an evidence-based afferent limb strategy while ensuring an adequate and timely medical response by existing hospital resources. Furthermore, we studied the predictive performance of the national early warning score (NEWS), which is a track-and-trigger system to detect patient deterioration using vital signs. Because of the importance of adequate staffing levels for patient surveillance, we additionally investigated which nurse staffing levels are needed to provide safe care and to minimise patient\u2019s unexpected death. We defined new outcome measures, more sensitive to care processes including nursing practice, to be used in research concerning the deteriorating patient on the general ward. We confirmed an association between higher adherence to a nurse observation protocol and lower patient unexpected death and mortality after cardiopulmonary arrest or unplanned intensive care admission adjusted for patient comorbidity and age. Furthermore, we have shown that an RRS improves nurses\u2019 performance in observing patients without increasing the observation frequency in stable patients. We showed that our intervention increased the mean number of vital signs registered per observation. In an external validation study, we calculated the predictive performance of the NEWS and confirmed that it shows acceptable performance to predict unexpected death, cardiac arrest with CPR and unplanned ICU admission. However, the NEWS had a relatively high proportion of false positive scores. This implies that clinicians should be aware of the limitations of this scoring system to prevent increased workload associated with false positives. Lastly, we found an association between higher nurse staffing levels and lower patient mortality controlling for important confounders. We confirmed the relation between a higher proportion of bachelor\u2019s degree nurses and patient mortality
Predicting serious adverse events or a safety net : rethinking the role of early warning scores
No full textCommentary : cultural adaptation of the revised Basel Instrument for Rationing of Care to the Turkish context: a study of validity and reliability
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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