Journal of evaluation in clinical practice
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To analyse anthropometric parameters, clinical pain and experimental pain in women with chronic pelvic pain (CPP). ⋯ Evaluation of anthropometric parameters and pain measurements can be applied in clinical practice, making a contribution to the diagnosis and influencing the choice of a more effective treatment for women with CPP.
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Diagnostic systems exist in many disciplines. Strengths and weaknesses of such diagnostic systems vary considerably within and among disciplinary domains of the health sciences. The logical framework behind each diagnostic process involves identifying a condition, seeking causes, establishing a prognosis and a treatment. Notably, a clinical diagnosis is a judgment focused on the present, aiming to cluster events associated with a disease. Diagnostic judgment focuses on the past when it attempts to isolate possible causes, and towards the future when it indicates prognoses and treatments. ⋯ The proposed logical framework has been applied to a nursing taxonomy-based diagnostic system in order to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses consistently with the epistemology of a diagnostic judgment.
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Falls in hospital are costly and may impact psychologically on fallers causing them to avoid mobilization, thereby affecting recovery rate and hospital length of stay. The study aim was to investigate the relationships between fear of falling, falls risk, in-hospital falls and hospital length of stay. ⋯ An admission MFES score of less than 5 is an effective predictor of patient falls and is associated with a significantly longer hospital length of stay.
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We aim to investigate a range of risk factors associated with medication adherence among Chinese hypertensive patients. We also aim to investigate the association between medication adherence and blood pressure control. ⋯ The rate of suboptimal medication adherence among Chinese hypertensive patients is quite high. Interventions could focus upon the risk factors to improve antihypertensive medication adherence in clinical practice.
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The quality of the current literature on external validity varies considerably. An improved checklist with validated items on external validity would aid decision-makers in judging similarities among circumstances when transferring evidence from a study setting to an implementation setting. In this paper, currently available checklists on external validity are identified, assessed and used as a basis for proposing a new improved instrument. ⋯ This paper provides building blocks for the development of a new checklist for external validity. The next step is provision of empirical evidence for the checklist items to be selected, and finally, development and validation of a checklist on external validity.