The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners
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Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study Clinical Trial
Patient and carer satisfaction with 'hospital at home': quantitative and qualitative results from a randomised controlled trial.
'Hospital At Home' schemes are set to increase in the United Kingdom (UK) in response to the NHS Plan. To date, little detailed work has been done on the acceptability of these schemes to patients and their carers. ⋯ Patient satisfaction was greater with Hospital at Home than with hospital. Reasons included a more personal style of care and a feeling that staying at home was therapeutic. Carers did not feel that Hospital at Home imposed an extra workload.
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Comparative Study
Patients' versus general practitioners' assessments of pain intensity in primary care patients with non-cancer pain.
Pain is a major cause for visiting a primary care physician. There are, however, few studies on the assessment of pain patients at the primary care level. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to investigate the concordance between general practitioners' (GPs') and patients' assessments of pain intensity and whether this assessment is influenced by the duration or intensity of pain. ⋯ The more severe the pain as assessed by patients, the greater the non-concordance between patients' and GPs' assessments. There was considerable non-concordance between GPs' and patients' assessments of pain intensity. GPs tended to estimate their patients' pain intensity as clinically significantly lower than the patients themselves, particularly in chronic and severe pain.
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Two hundred and fifty ambulatory patients with febrile respiratory tract infections were included in a prospective study, aimed at determining the reliability of physicians judgements relating to the aetiology of the infection. Compared with advanced serological testing, physicians' judgements for a bacterial/atypical, rather than viral, aetiology had a negative predictive value of 60% and a positive predictive value of only 50%. We conclude that physicians' ability to assess whether the infectious aetiology of RTI is viral or bacterial/atypical is low and no more reliable than tossing a coin.