Studies in health technology and informatics
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2007
Conceptualisation of socio-technical integrated information technology solutions to improve incident reporting through Maslow's hierarchy of needs: a qualitative study of junior doctors.
Medical errors are common, especially within the acute healthcare delivery. The identification of systemic factors associated with adverse events and the construction of models to improve the safety of the healthcare system seems straightforward, this process has been proven to be much more difficult in the realism of medical practice due to the failure of the incident reporting system to capture the essential information, especially from the perspective of junior doctors. The failure of incidence reporting system has been related to the lack of socio-technical consideration for both system designs and system implementations. ⋯ Using Maslow's hierarchy of needs as the conceptual framework, the guiding principles aim to design electronic incident reporting systems which will motivate junior doctors to participate in the process. This research paper aims to make a significant contribution to the fields of socio-technical systems and medical errors management. The design and implementation of the new incident reporting system has great potential to motivate junior doctors to change the culture of incident reporting and to work towards a safer future healthcare system.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2006
Nurses confronting sexual harassment in the medical environment.
Sexual harassment is an important and widespread public health problem, particularly for nurses who work in the medical environment. Some studies note that nursing is the profession with the highest rates of sexual harassment; however, few studies of sexual harassment of nurses in the medical workplace were found in Taiwan. Methodologically, a cross-sectional survey with a self-administered structured questionnaire was implemented for this study. ⋯ A total of 307 subjects were selected. The results show: (1) there are 175 subjects who experienced sexual harassment in medical practice, which is 57% of 307 sampled nurses; (2) the frequency of verbal sexual harassment (55.7%) is higher than non-verbal sexual harassment (40.1%) and physical sexual harassment (39.1%). The results of this study can provide information for the teaching hospitals and clinical instructors to help understand the prevalence and management strategies for nurses suffering from sexual harassment in the medical workplace.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2006
Emergency medical information system for transferring patients to the medical institute by triage-result.
The Objective of this study was to triage the emergency patients in a pre-hospital stage and transfer them to the appropriate medical institute by the triaged result. For this, considering the pre-hospital emergence situation, we selected the Manchester system as the triage. ⋯ Through this study, the medical institute can be selected based on patient condition. In addition we also can expect the emergency medical institutes to be effectively managed.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2006
A Markov model to describe daily changes in organ failure for patients at the ICU.
As the support and stabilization of organ function is a major goal of treatment in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), changes in the function of organ systems are an important indicator of the progression of the disease and recovery. This paper presents how to construct a model that describes changes in organ failure of ICU patients on a day-to-day basis. ⋯ The joint set of equations, extended with equations for predicting ICU discharge and death, constitutes a firstorder multivariate Markov model. We applied the procedure on a dataset and found that most types of organ failure are highly persistent.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2006
Relation between the sagittal pelvic and lumbar spine geometries following surgical correction of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis: a preliminary study.
The influence of surgery on the relationship between the lumbar spine and the pelvis in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) remains mostly unknown. The sagittal spinopelvic balance of 40 patients with AIS undergoing posterior spinal instrumentation and fusion was studied. After surgery, the total lumbar lordosis (LL) and the LL below fusion remained correlated to the sagittal pelvic geometry. ⋯ This preliminary study shows that pelvic morphology probably has an important impact on the postoperative sagittal lumbar alignment. Evaluation of the sagittal pelvic geometry could therefore be useful in the preoperative planning of surgery for AIS. Further studies with more patients are still needed in order to confirm this hypothesis and to evaluate if the distal fusion level influences the spino-pelvic balance.