Ministry of Health Library
Health Improvement and Innovation Digest
Issue 127 - 22 September 2016
Welcome to the fortnightly Health Improvement and Innovation Digest (HIID). The Digest has links to key evidence of interest, with access to new content arranged by topic.
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Have you heard about Grey Matter?
We'd like to introduce you to another newsletter that the Ministry of Health Library prepares. The Grey Matter newsletter provides monthly access to a selection of recent NGO, Think Tank, and International Government reports related to health. Information is arranged by topic, allowing readers to quickly find their areas of interest. You can use this link to subscribe to Grey Matter.
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Article access
For articles that aren't open access, contact your DHB library, or organisational or local library for assistance in accessing the full text. If your organisation has a subscription, you may be able to use the icon under full text links in PubMed to access the full article.
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Hospital Productivity (International)
Admission avoidance hospital at home
Admission avoidance hospital at home provides active treatment by healthcare professionals in the patient's home for a condition that otherwise would require acute hospital inpatient care, and always for a limited time period. This Cochrane Review aimed to determine the effectiveness and cost of managing patients with admission avoidance hospital at home compared with inpatient hospital care.
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Shorter Waits for Cancer Treatment (International)
Shifting paradigms continued-the emergence and the role of nurse navigator
Lung Cancer remains the leading cause of cancer death in men and women worldwide. The thoracic/pulmonary oncology nurse navigator (ONN) plays a pivotal role in a rapid diagnostic and treatment pathway facilitating timely access to care and reducing barriers to treatment for the lung cancer patient. In this review, published in the Journal of Thoracic Disease, the author provides a perspective on the history, current role, and potential future role of the ONN.
Patterns and predictors of colorectal cancer care coordination: A population-based survey of Australian patients
Improving care coordination is a key priority for health services. The aims of this study, published in Cancer, were to identify patient- and health service-related predictors of poorly coordinated care and to explore patient preferences to assist care coordination.
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Shorter Stays In Emergency Departments (International)
Associations between Extending Access to Primary Care and Emergency Department Visits: A Difference-In-Differences Analysis
Health services across the world increasingly face pressures on the use of expensive hospital services. Better organisation and delivery of primary care has the potential to manage demand and reduce costs for hospital services, but routine primary care services are not open during evenings and weekends. Extended access (evening and weekend opening) is hypothesized to reduce pressure on hospital services from emergency department visits. However, the existing evidence-base is weak, largely focused on emergency out-of-hours services, and analysed using a before-and after-methodology without effective comparators. This study, published in PLOS Medicine, extends this evidence base.
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Primary Health Care (New Zealand)
Prescription medicine sharing: exploring patients' beliefs and experiences
Prescription medicine sharing has been defined as the lending of medicines (giving prescription medicines to someone else) or borrowing of medicines (being given and using a medicine prescribed for another person). This qualitative study, published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Policy and Practice, explored the views of patients, to elicit information regarding factors influencing medicine sharing behaviours, their experiences of the consequences of prescription medicine sharing, and their risk assessment strategies when deciding to share.
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Primary Mental Health (International)
Collaborative nurse-led self-management support for primary care patients with anxiety, depressive or somatic symptoms: Cluster-randomised controlled trial (findings of the SMADS study)
Collaborative, nurse-led care is a well-established model of ambulatory care in many healthcare systems. Nurses play a key role in managing patients' conditions as well as in enhancing symptom- and self-management skills. The SMADS trial, published in the International Journal of Nursing Studies, evaluated the effectiveness of a primary care-based, nurse-led, complex intervention to promote self-management in patients with anxiety, depressive or somatic symptoms.
Continuation and maintenance treatments for depression in older people
Depressive illness is common in old age. Prevalence in the community of case level depression is around 15% and milder forms of depression are more common. It causes significant distress and disability. The number of people over the age of 60 years is expected to double by 2050 and so interventions for this often long-term and recurrent condition are increasingly important. The causes of late-life depression differ from depression in younger adults and so it is appropriate to study it separately. The objective of this Cochrane Review was to examine the efficacy of antidepressants and psychological therapies in preventing the relapse and recurrence of depression in older people.
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