Internal medicine journal
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Internal medicine journal · Feb 2022
Death determination, organ donation and the importance of the Dead Donor Rule following withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment: A survey of community opinions.
Background: Organ donation (OD) following circulatory determination of death (DCDD) is an increasing source of transplant organs but little is known about community opinions on treatment withdrawal, determination of death and acceptance of OD in DCDD. ⋯ We found high levels of support for treatment withdrawal in severe brain injury and when requested by a quadriplegic patient. While there was variable agreement with the timing of death determination and with OD under anaesthesia, support for OD was high in both scenarios. For many people death determination prior to OD may not be of paramount importance.
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Internal medicine journal · Feb 2022
Automated information extraction from free-text medical documents for stroke key performance indicators: a pilot study.
Automated information extraction might be able to assist with the collection of stroke key performance indicators (KPI). The feasibility of using natural language processing for classification-based KPI and datetime field extraction was assessed. ⋯ The datetime field extraction method was successful in 29 of 43 (67.4%) cases. Further studies are indicated.
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Internal medicine journal · Feb 2022
Hospitalisation and associated costs of gastrointestinal bleeding from primary prevention aspirin use in South Australia: a retrospective case series analysis.
We assessed hospitalisations for gastrointestinal bleeding directly related to primary prevention aspirin in lower risk patients for a 6-month period in three South Australian hospitals. Those with related underlying pathology or concurrent causative medication were excluded. ⋯ Mean hospital admission cost was $6769 (95% confidence interval $5198-$8340), with projected state and national annual costs of $0.57 and $8.12 million respectively. In light of recent guideline changes, clinicians need to vigorously assess the need for primary prevention aspirin.
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Internal medicine journal · Feb 2022
Regional Victoria physician subspecialty training and workforce: the current state of play.
This report outlines the advantages and barriers to working and training in regional Victoria with an aim to provide future researchers with data points to address the maldistribution of medical specialists in regional Australia. Some of the advantages are positive job satisfaction, collegiality and good work-life balance, while increased workload and insufficient number of specialists were reported as disadvantages.
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The ideal model of care in general medicine remains elusive, perhaps because of interhospital heterogeneity in patient population and resource allocation to both general medicine and the medical subspecialties. We explain why successful interventions at one site are not easily applied in another and recommend a nationally coordinated examination of the best general medicine departments' methods of clinical practice improvement.