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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.

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.

Quality Improvement (New Zealand)

Improved compliance with the World Health Organization Surgical Safety Checklist is associated with reduced surgical specimen labelling errors
A new approach to administering the surgical safety checklist (SSC) at our institution using wall-mounted charts for each SSC domain coupled with migrated leadership among operating room (OR) sub-teams, led to improved compliance with the Sign Out domain. Since surgical specimens are reviewed at Sign Out, the authors of this study, published in the New Zealand Medical Journal, aimed to quantify any related change in surgical specimen labelling errors.


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.


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.


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.


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.


Primary Health Care (International)

Clinician-identified problems and solutions for delayed diagnosis in primary care: a PRIORITIZE study
Delayed diagnosis in primary care is a common, harmful and costly patient safety incident. Its measurement and monitoring are underdeveloped and underutilised. The authors of this study, published in BMC Family Practice, created and implemented a novel approach to identify problems leading to and solutions for delayed diagnosis in primary care.


Primary Mental Health (New Zealand)

The effects of spatially varying earthquake impacts on mood and anxiety symptom treatments among long-term Christchurch residents following the 2010/11 Canterbury earthquakes, New Zealand
This study, published in Health & Place, investigates the effects of disruptions to different community environments, community resilience and cumulated felt earthquake intensities on yearly mood and anxiety symptom treatments from the New Zealand Ministry of Health's administrative databases between September 2009 and August 2012.

The uses of mental health telephone counselling service for Chinese speaking people in New Zealand: demographics, presenting problems and evaluation of the calls
This study, published in the New Zealand Medical Journal, aimed to investigate the call profiles of a Chinese-speaking mental health counselling helpline service in New Zealand (Chinese Lifeline provided by Lifeline Aotearoa) and to evaluate the calls and explore the possible factors influencing the outcome of the calls.


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.


Better Help for smokers to Quit (New Zealand)

Young Adult Perceptions of the British American Tobacco New Zealand Agree/Disagree Plain Packaging Counter-Campaign
In 2012, British American Tobacco New Zealand (BATNZ) launched a mass media campaign branded "Agree/ Disagree" as a response to the New Zealand government's plans to introduce plain packaging. The study, published in Nicotine and Tobacco Research, examined young adult's views about the campaign to assist tobacco control policymakers in planning future interventions.

Smokers' Perceptions of the Relative Effectiveness of Five Tobacco Retail Reduction Policies
Reducing the widespread retail availability of tobacco could help realize tobacco endgame strategies. This study, published in Nicotine and Tobacco Research , assessed New Zealand smokers' perceptions of five potential policies designed to reduce the retail supply of tobacco, relative to a "benchmark" policy of annual tobacco tax increases.


Weight Management (New Zealand)

Family-centered brief intervention for reducing obesity and cardiovascular disease risk: A randomized controlled trial
The objective of this study, published in Obesity, was to assess the effects of a family-centered, physical activity and nutrition "brief" intervention (time-limited contact) on body weight and related health outcomes in primary health care patients with an elevated 5-year cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk.


Childhood Obesity (New Zealand)

Protecting New Zealand children from exposure to the marketing of unhealthy foods and drinks: a comparison of three nutrient profiling systems to classify foods
Promotion of unhealthy foods and drinks is a significant, modifiable risk factor for child obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases. The authors of this study, published in the New Zealand Medical Journal, compared three accepted nutrient profiling systems: the Health Star Rating (HSR), the Ministry of Health Food and Beverage Classification System (FBCS) and the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe Nutrient Profiling Model, to identify the best system to protect New Zealand children from exposure to the marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages.


Childhood Obesity (International)

Diagnostic performance of neck circumference to identify overweight and obesity as defined by body mass index in children and adolescents: systematic review and meta-analysis
The neck circumference (NC) has been shown to be an accurate index for screening overweight and obesity in children and adolescents. The objective of this study, published in the Annals of Human Biology, was to perform a meta-analysis to assess the performance of NC for the assessment of overweight and obesity.

The Association of Weight Loss with Cardiometabolic Outcomes in Obese Children: Systematic Review and Meta-regression
Excess body weight in children is associated with multiple immediate and long term medical comorbidities. The authors of this study, published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, aimed to identify the degree of reduction in excess body weight associated with cardiometabolic changes (lipid panel, liver function tests, systolic (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), HgA1C and fasting blood glucose) in overweight and obese children.


Ministry of Health - Manatū Hauora
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New Zealand

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