Hospitals : number

In compliance with Data Protection legislation and the General Medical Council guidelines on confidentiality, the Yellow Card was updated in September 2000 to ask for an identification number for the patient for instance, a practice or hospital number. The CSM no longer asked for personal patient identifiers on Yellow Cards all that is now required is the patient s initials and age instead of their name and date of birth. The inclusion of the identification number enables the patient to be identifiable to the reporter but not to the CSM, thus allowing the reporter to know to whom the report refers for any potential future correspondence. 

Hospital admission rates were more sensitive to the frequency of hospital care than were the percentages of men hospitalized. Numbers of men admitted to Army hospitals were compared for men exposed to only one chemical group (Table 13) and for men exposed to chemicals in more than one group, including the group of interest (Table 14). The percentages of hospitalized men in each chemical-test group seldom exceeded that of NCT subjects more than trivially. No pattern of... 

Correct identification of patients and specimens is a major concern for laboratories. The highest frequency of errors occurs with the use of handwritten labels and request forms. One method for checking identification is to compare identifiers such as the patient s name and his or her unique hospital number. The identification on the specimen label should also correspond with the identification on the requisition form. The use of plastic embossed patient identification cards to imprint the patient s name on test request forms and on blood collection labels can eliminate transcription and identification errors but does not guarantee that tiie patient name on the labels correctly identifies the donor of the specimen. The integration of bar code technology into the analytical systems that are used by clinical laboratories has significantly reduced identification problems (see Chapter 11). 

Enter the patient s information into the computer, such as name, clinic or hospital number, birthdate, and weight as well as the dosage of 18F-FDG. 

Specimen containers should be labelled with the patient s name, hospital number and the date and time, before the sample is taken... 

The main development in medical diagnostic reagents since the 1960s has been the steady growth of dry (soHd-phase) chemistry systems. Dry chemistry systems have made substantial gains over wet clinical analysis in the number of tests performed in hospitals, laboratories, and homes because of ease, rehabiUty, and accuracy. 

In hospitals and long-term cate units, unit-dose packages ate used mote and mote. This system aHows better control of the dispensed dmgs in institutional settings and precludes the dispensing of larger numbers of doses than needed. 

Clinically, GM-CSF or G-CSF have been used to accelerate recovery after chemotherapy and total body or extended field irradiation, situations that cause neutropenia and decreased platelets, and possibly lead to fatal septic infection or diffuse hemorrhage, respectively. G-CSF and GM-CSF reproducibly decrease the period of granulocytopenia, the number of infectious episodes, and the length of hospitalization in such patients (152), although it is not clear that dose escalation of the cytotoxic agent and increased cure rate can be rehably achieved. One aspect of the effects of G-CSF and GM-CSF is that these agents can activate mature cells to function more efficiently. This may, however, also lead to the production of cytokines, such as TNF- a, that have some toxic side effects. In general, both cytokines are reasonably well tolerated. The side effect profile of G-CSF is more favorable than that of GM-CSF. Medullary bone pain is the only common toxicity. 

The critical parameters of ethylene oxide steriliza tion are temperature, time, gas concentration, and relative humidity. The critical role of humidity has been demonstrated by a number of studies (11,18,19). Temperature, time, and gas concentration requirements are dependent not only on the bioburden, but also on the type of hardware and gas mixture used. If cycle development is not possible, as in the case of hospital steriliza tion, the manufacturer s recommendations should be followed. 

The U-tube exchanger with copper tubes, cast-iron header, and other parts of carbon steel is used for water and steam services in office buildings, schools, hospitals, hotels, etc. Nonferrous tube sheets and admiralty or 90-10 copper-nickel tubes are the most frequently used substitute materials. These standard exchangers are available from a number of manufacturers at costs far below those of custom-built process-industry equipment. 

Can any number of identical subunits be accommodated in the asymmetric unit while preserving specificity of interactions within an icosahedral arrangement This question was answered by Don Caspar then at Children s Hospital, Boston, and Aaron Klug in Cambridge, England, who showed in a classical paper in 1962 that only certain multiples (1, 3, 4, 7...) of 60 subunits are likely to occur. They called these multiples triangulation numbers, T. Icosahedral virus structures are frequently referred to in terms of their trian-gulation numbers a T = 3 virus structure therefore implies that the number of subunits in the icosahedral shell is 3 x 60 = 180. 

Some of the accidents in this book occurred during the 1990s. Others go back several decades, a few even earlier. In every walk of life, if we describe something that happened a number of years ago, someone will say, Schools/hospitals/offices/factories aren t like that any more. Are the old reports still relevant ... 

Urinary lithiasis is a disease in which calculi form in the kidney and urinary tract. Roughly 5 % of the human population suffers to some degree from urinary lithiasis. A number of severely afflicted patients (e.g. ca. 60,000 in West Germany and more than 100,000 in the U.S.) are hospitalized yearly for major surgical treatment. Obviously, nephrolithiasis is not only a common ailment but also an issue of great social and economic consequence. 

About 4.5 million Americans have heart failure (HF). It is the most frequent cause of hospitalization for individuals older than 65 years. Some patients, with treatment, may lead nearly normal lives, whereas more than 50% of individuals with severe HF die each year. HF is a complex clinical syndrome that can result from any number of cardiac or metabolic disorders such as ischemic heart disease, hypertension, or hyperthyroidism. Any condition that impairs the ability of the ventricle to pump blood can lead to HF In HF, die heart... 

Because of shortened hospital stays and inoreases in the number of ambulatory surgeries tor many eye problems, the patient may be required to instill eye drops or ointment at home. If the patient is unable to do so, a family member or friend may have to instill the preparation, the nurse uses the following guide to evaluate that the patient or caregiver can properly instill the e drops or ointment ... 

An effective HE or cost-effectiveness analysis is designed to answer certain questions, such as Is the treatment effective What will it cost and How do the gains compare with the costs By combining answers to all of these questions, the technique helps decision makers weigh the factors, compare alternative treatments, and decide which treatments are most appropriate for specific situations. Typically, one chooses the option with the least cost per unit of measure gained the results are represented by the ratio of cost to effectiveness (C E). With this type of analysis, called a cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), various disease end points that are affected by therapy (risk markers, disease severity, death) can be assessed by corresponding indexes of therapeutic outcome (mmHg blood pressure reduction, hospitalizations averted, life years saved, respectively). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to elaborate further on principles of cost-effectiveness analyses. A number of references are available for this purpose [11-13]. 

Drew et al (1999) Australia 37 24/36 Hospital stay and number of admissions reduced. Global costs remained the same... 

Data on antidepressant dmgs are available from a number of sources randomized, controlled clinical trials (RCTs) in both hospital and primary-care populations decision analytic models population-based naturalistic observational studies of usual... 

---