The Occupational Medicine Forum is prepared by the ACOEM Occupational and Environmental Medical Practice Committee and does not necessarily represent an official ACOEM position. The Forum is intended for health professionals and is not intended to provide medical or legal advice, including illness prevention, diagnosis or treatment, or regulatory compliance. ...

PURPOSE: General practitioners play or should play a role in occupational medicine (OM), either in diagnosing occupational diseases or in counseling on return to work. Nevertheless, their training has been reported to be insufficient in most single country studies. AIMS: The objectives of this study were to analyze the content ...

BACKGROUND: Occupational exposure to bloodborne pathogens (OEBPs) is a serious health and safety concern for health care providers. Lack of experience of medical personal in training could make them more susceptible for acquiring infections by these infectious agents. METHODS: We conducted a 5-year retrospective review of all reported occupational exposures. ...

The number of Japanese working age persons who have experienced a stroke is significantly increasing. In such cases work support is an urgent issue. Although an active cooperation between medical institutions and work support agencies is critical, it has been insufficient, due to an absence of key coordinators with sufficient ...

Historical inquiry enriches occupational therapy practice by identifying enduring values and inspiring future excellence. This study presents for the first time the pioneering life and work of Philip King Brown, a San Francisco physician who used occupation to treat the physical, mental, and social effects of tuberculosis (TB) at Arequipa ...

The Occupational Medicine Forum is prepared by the ACOEM Occupational and Environmental Medical Practice Committee and does not necessarily represent an official ACOEM position. The Forum is intended for health professionals and is not intended to provide medical or legal advice, including illness prevention, diagnosis or treatment, or regulatory compliance. ...

Abstract Purpose: To examine the associations between medical, work-related, organizational and sociodemographic factors and job loss during sick leave in a Dutch population of 4132 employees on sick leave. Methods: Data were assessed by occupational health physicians (OHPs) on sociodemographic, medical, work-related and organizational factors. Odds ratios for job loss ...

In Germany, more than 100 bladder tumor cases are annually recognized as occupational disease and compensated, given that medical experts regard exposure to carcinogenic aromatic amines as a likely cause of cancer. The amount of compensation is initially based on the tumor staging and grading at the time of initial ...

This article describes the different clinical variants of irritant-induced asthma, specifically focusing on high-dose irritant-induced asthma and irritant-induced work-exacerbated asthma, as well as reviews known causes, addresses the often adverse medical and socioeconomic outcomes of this complex condition, and considers issues of causation from an occupational and environmental medicine perspective.

The Occupational Medicine Forum is prepared by the ACOEM Occupational and Environmental Medical Practice Committee and does not necessarily represent an official ACOEM position. The Forum is intended for health professionals and is not intended to provide medical or legal advice, including illness prevention, diagnosis or treatment, or regulatory compliance. ...

Death certificates and medical examiner records have been useful yet imperfect data sources for work-related fatality research and surveillance among adult workers. It is unclear whether this holds for work-related fatalities among adolescent workers who suffer unique detection challenges in part because they are not often thought of as workers. ...

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: The main subject is the influence of gender and the stage of life on the choice of specialty in medical education. In particular we looked at the influence of intrinsic and external motives on this relationship. The choice of specialty was divided into two moments: the choice between ...

BACKGROUND: Mastectomy is a common treatment for breast cancer. We set out to quantify the health state utility assessment of living with bilateral mastectomy using previously described validated methods. METHODS: Utility assessments using visual analogue scale (VAS), time trade-off (TTO), and standard gamble (SG) were used to obtain utilities for ...

RxNorm was utilized as the basis for direct-capture of medication history data in a live EHR system deployed in a large, multi-state outpatient behavioral healthcare provider in the United States serving over 75,000 distinct patients each year across 130 clinical locations. This tool incorporated auto-complete search functionality for medications and ...

EDITORIAL COMMENT on END-2011-0214-CRT.R3 Laparoscopic RPLND: Is it safe, does it harm, what does the robot add? G. Janetschek, Medical University Salzburg, Dept. of Urology.

Malaise and fainting are unpleasant acupuncture adverse effects. This paper shows how the use of thermography might identify subjects before the systematic responses become clinically significant.

Unlike the pharmaceutical industry, no empirical research has focused on the factors influencing research and development (R&D) spending in the medical device industry. To fill that gap, this study examines how R&D spending is influenced by prior year cash flow and corporate market value using multiple regression analysis and a ...

Philippe Calain discusses the health and environmental hazards of extractive industries like mining and explores the tensions that arise when medical humanitarian organizations are called to intervene in emergencies involving the extractive sector.

The purpose of this study was to develop a method to define and rate the severity of adverse events (AEs) in emergency medical services (EMS) safety research. They used a modified Delphi technique to develop a consensus definition of an AE. The consensus definition was as follows: "An adverse event ...

This study was initiated by a Pastoral Care Department of a large academic medical center in order to establish hospital chaplaincy policies and procedures. Four basic questions were asked about professional hospital chaplains and record keeping. The results of the survey show that the standard of practice is that chaplains ...

Background: Pharmaceutical industry involvement in biomedicine has produced major benefits but has also caused concern. At present, there is no consensus as to how medical and government organizations should relate to the pharmaceutical industry and this is partly due to the absence of systematic study of the various alternatives. In ...

Medical abortion is one of the most important advances of the last century in the field of reproductive health. However, the introduction and use of the technology varies widely among countries. The article examines the commercial, political, regulatory, and legislative history of the introduction of mifepristone-misoprostol in France and the ...

The Clinical Narrative Temporal Relation Ontology (CNTRO)1 project offers a semantic-web based reasoning framework, which represents temporal events and relationships within clinical narrative texts, and infer new knowledge over them. In this paper, the CNTRO reasoning framework is applied to temporal analysis of medical device adverse event files. One specific ...

Poison centres are an underutilized source of information on adverse events related to medications, including therapeutic errors and adverse drug reactions. To demonstrate the feasibility of using a poison centres' electronic data to identify and describe adverse events related to medications. This one-year, retrospective cross-sectional pilot study was conducted at ...

As part of a 10-year follow-up study of morbidity following spouse bereavement, concordance between subject reports of their illness experience and that given by their doctors' and other medical records has been assessed. Enumeration from medical records involved extensive and careful perusal of general practitioner, specialist, and hospital records while ...

On red grouse estates in the UK the nematode parasite Trichostrongylus tenuis is often controlled by application of grit medicated with the anthelmintic fenbendazole (FBZ). To date, assessment of the efficacy has been inhibited by the inability to quantify uptake of FBZ by the birds. We have developed a simple ...

Work stress and coping resource may contribute to the quality of life in medical professionals. This study is to determine the relationships among work stressor, personal strain, coping resource and the quality of life (QOL) and its two dimensions in medical professionals. The Chinese version of Short Form-36 Health Survey ...

Good medical leadership is vital in delivering high-quality healthcare, and yet medical career progression has traditionally seen leadership lack credence in comparison with technical and academic ability. Individual standards have varied, leading to variations in the quality of medical leadership between different organisations and, on occasions, catastrophic lapses in the ...

A recent systematic review found no "good quality evidence" that elective induction of labor confers substantial benefits to either mothers or babies, but concluded that elective induction is associated with a decreased risk of "cesarean delivery." Admittedly, elective induction was qualified as "at 41 weeks of gestation and beyond" with ...

The current medical education model is based on the assumption that students progress from a mastery of basic mechanisms of human structure and function to an understanding of a variety of pathologies and treatments using sound scientific principles. In this commentary, the authors suggest another approach to developing medical school ...

Good marital quality (MQ) is associated with better outcomes in many medical illnesses, especially for women. However, improved outcome is only apparent when MQ is measured across a range of marital functioning and when it is statistically described as either good or poor functioning. This article describes the biological processes ...

Medical laboratories, and specifically genetic testing laboratories, provide vital medical services to different clients: clinicians requesting a test, patients from whom the sample was collected, public health and medical-legal instances, referral laboratories and authoritative bodies. All expect results that are accurate and obtained in an efficient and effective manner, within ...

Objective To evaluate quality of life among patients of Family Health Strategy Units and how it relates to the prescribing complexity and to the number of psychotropic medications prescribed, including adjustments for sociodemographic characteristics. Setting Family Health Strategy Units in a municipality in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do ...

Frequently, prescribers fail to account for changing kidney function when prescribing medications. We evaluated the use of a computerized provider order entry intervention to improve medication management during acute kidney injury. Quality improvement report with time series analyses. 1,598 adult inpatients with a minimum 0.5-mg/dL increase in serum creatinine level ...

Preparing a medical school for institutional review can be a challenging undertaking for any institution requiring an understanding of the international standards being used and adequate preparation and planning (MacCarrick et al. in Med Teach 32(5):e227-e232, 2010). This series examines each of the nine standards developed by the World Federation ...

Concern about the quality and safety of health care persists, 10 years after the 1999 Institute of Medicine report To Err is Human. Despite growing awareness of quality and safety risks, and significant efforts to improve, progress is difficult to measure. Hospital leaders, including boards and medical staffs, are accountable ...

OBJECTIVES: To examine socio-demographic disparities associated with a quality medical home. METHODS: A nationally representative sample of children ages 0-17 years (n = 102,353) from the 2003 National Survey of Children's Health. Risk factors including non-white race/ethnicity, income <200% of the federal poverty level (FPL), uninsured, parent education lesser than ...

The currently known distribution range of Achatina fulica Bowdich, 1822, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, is presented. The record of A. fulica naturally infested with Aelurostrongylus abstrusus larvae (Railliet, 1898) (Nematoda: Metastrongylidae) can be found in the city of Guaratinguetá. It was found A. fulica with Metastrongylidae larvae ...

To identify factors affecting doctors' engagement with the Safer Patients Initiative (SPI). Qualitative interview study. Four organisations participating in phase 1 of the SPI programme, from four different geographical locations in the UK. 34 staff members, comprising senior executive/management leads involved in the SPI programme, the principal SPI programme coordinator ...

Geographic variations in service utilization have emerged as sentinels of quality of care. We used data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW), the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Area Resource File to examine interstate variations in psychotropic medication use among children coming into contact with child ...

Transitions between healthcare settings are associated with errors in communication of information and treatment plans for frail older patients, but strategies to improve transitional care are lacking. A systematic review was conducted to identify and evaluate interventions to improve communication of accurate and appropriate medication lists and advance directives for ...

Lagging quality of care in the U.S. health care system has been a persistent problem and challenge. In the past, medical professionalism and professional certification have served as cornerstones for improving quality in health care. Among newer efforts to improve quality, pay for performance has been proposed to propel better ...

The effectiveness of a quality improvement (QI) program developed by Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids, Mich., is in many ways exemplified by its Acute Myocardial Infarction/Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (AMI/PCI) Improvement project, launched in 2003. Team structure played a major part in the AMI/PCI Improvement project's success. Indispensable members of the ...

To examine the impact of billing and clinical data extracted from an electronic medical record system on the calculation of an adverse drug event (ADE) quality measure approved for use in The Joint Commission's ORYX program, a mandatory national hospital quality reporting system. The Child Health Corporation of America's "Use ...

BACKGROUND: Quality improvement programs that allow physicians to document medical reasons for deviating from guidelines preserve clinicians' judgment while enabling them to strive for high performance. However, physician misconceptions or gaming potentially limit programs. OBJECTIVE: To implement computerized decision support with mechanisms to document medical exceptions to quality measures and ...

PURPOSE: This study examines the contributions of known predictors of survival and quality of life (QOL) to 1-year survival in ICD recipients. METHODS: This study used the data set from the antiarrhythmia versus implanted defibrillator (AVID) controlled clinical trial conducted by the National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Lung, and ...

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to provide enough information so beginners can feel comfortable starting and completing a simple radiology process improvement project. CONCLUSION: Medical practices (including radiology departments) need to address outstanding quality and safety issues that threaten their patients. Addressing these issues improves patient care and ...

Fully 23 years after enactment of the Health Care Quality Improvement Act and 19 years after initiation of the National Practitioner Data Bank reporting requirements, the identification and proper processing of adverse privileging actions continues to be a dynamic, challenging, and rights-preserving system at the forefront of the quality assurance ...

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to show the possibility to identify what decisions in the initial regional medical command and control (IRMCC) that have to be improved. DESIGN: This was a prospective, observational study conducted during nine similar educational programs for regional and hospital medical command and control ...

Exposure to formaldehyde (FA) causes irritative effects and induces nasopharyngeal cancer; the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, Lyon) classified FA as carcinogenic to humans, Group 1. Many studies have been published so far concerning the occupational exposure of industrial workers, embalmers, pathologists and anatomists to FA but very ...