Ministry of Health Library

Health Improvement and Innovation Digest

Issue 144 - 8 June 2017

Welcome to the fortnightly Health Improvement and Innovation Digest (formerly the HIIRC digest). 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.  If you'd like to subscribe to Grey Matter, email library@moh.govt.nz

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)

Raising the Bar on the National Patient Experience Survey
This publication, by the Health Quality & Safety Commission, responds to the national inpatient experience survey results by investigating the lower scoring areas of the survey and recommending interventions to improve these results.

Hospital Productivity (New Zealand)

Readmissions to Intensive Care: A Prospective Multicenter Study in Australia and New Zealand
The aim of this study, published in Critical Care Medicine, was to determine factors independently associated with readmission to the Intensive Care Unit and the independent association of readmission with subsequent mortality.

Enhanced Recovery After Surgery for Suspected Ovarian Malignancy: A Survey of Perioperative Practice Among Gynecologic Oncologists in Australia and New Zealand to Inform a Clinical Trial
The objective of this survey, published in International Journal of Gynecological Cancer, was to review the current standard of perioperative care of patients with suspected advanced ovarian cancer in Australia and New Zealand in order to determine the level of equipoise for specific interventions.

Hospital Productivity (International)

Implementation of Enhanced Recovery After Surgery: a strategy to transform surgical care across a health system
Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) programs have been shown to have a positive impact on outcome. The ERAS care system includes an evidence-based guideline, an implementation program, and an interactive audit system to support practice change. The purpose of this study, published in Implementation Science, is to describe the use of the Theoretic Domains Framework (TDF) in changing surgical care and application of the Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI) model to analyse end-to-end implementation of ERAS in colorectal surgery across multiple sites within a single health system.

Shorter Waits for Cancer Treatment (New Zealand)

Mammography service screening and breast cancer mortality in New Zealand: a National Cohort Study 1999-2011
This breast cancer mortality evaluation, published in the British Journal of Cancer, is the first mortality evaluation of service screening mammography in New Zealand since commencement of screening in 1999. It applies to the 1999-2011 diagnostic period.

Shorter Waits for Cancer Treatment (International)

Lessons learned from a pilot study of an Indigenous patient navigator intervention in Queensland, Australia
Indigenous patient navigator (IPN) programmes show promise in addressing barriers to cancer care and facilitation of patient self-efficacy. The purpose of this paper, published in European Journal of Cancer Care, is to describe and reflect upon the experience of training an IPN and implementation of the intervention in the Australian context with Indigenous cancer patients.

What Makes Patient Navigation Most Effective: Defining Useful Tasks and Networks
Given the momentum in adopting patient navigation into cancer care, there is a need to understand the contribution of specific navigator activities to improved clinical outcomes. A mixed-methods study, published in Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, combined direct observations of patient navigators within the Patient Navigation Research Program and outcome data from the trial.

Shorter Stays In Emergency Departments (International)

Mapping workforce configuration and operational models in Australian emergency departments: a national survey
Hospital emergency departments (ED) in Australia and internationally have been experiencing increased demand, resulting in reduced hospital quality, impaired access and adverse health outcomes. Effective evaluation of new ED service models and their effect on outcomes is reliant on baseline measures of the staffing configuration and organisational characteristics of the EDs being studied. The aim of the present study, published in the Australian Health Review, was to comprehensively measure these variables in Australian EDs.

Primary Health Care (New Zealand)

Effects of eHealth Literacy on General Practitioner Consultations: A Mediation Analysis
Most evidence (not all) points in the direction that individuals with a higher level of health literacy will less frequently utilize the health care system than individuals with lower levels of health literacy. The underlying reasons of this effect are largely unclear, though people's ability to seek health information independently at the time of wide availability of such information on the Internet has been cited in this context. This study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, proposes to test two potential mediators of the negative effect of eHealth literacy on health care utilization: health information seeking, and gain in empowerment by information seeking.

Attachment to place in advanced age: A study of the LiLACS NZ cohort
An extensive body of research theorises that attachment to place is positively associated with health, particularly for older people. Building on this, the authors of this study, published in Social Science & Medicine, measure how indicators of attachment to place are associated with health for in people of advanced age in New Zealand.

Primary Health Care (International)

Towards an optimal composition of general practitioners and nurse practitioners in out-of-hours primary care teams: a quasi-experimental study
The objective of this study, published in BMJ Open, was to gain insights into the ability of general practitioners (GPs) and nurse practitioners (NPs) to meet patient demands in out-of-hours primary care by comparing the outcomes of teams with different ratios of practitioners.

Primary Mental Health (New Zealand)

Paternal Depression Symptoms During Pregnancy and After Childbirth Among Participants in the Growing Up in New Zealand Study
Antenatal and postnatal depression are known to be common and associated with poor outcomes for women and their children. There is little evidence on depression symptoms among men during the perinatal period. The objective of this study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, was to identify characteristics associated with depression symptoms among men whose partners were pregnant and subsequently gave birth.

Mood and anxiety disorders in Australia and New Zealand's indigenous populations: A systematic review and meta-analysis
The Indigenous populations of Australia and New Zealand are considered at higher risk of mood and anxiety disorders but many studies do not include direct comparisons with similar non-Indigenous controls. This systematic review and meta-analysis, published in Psychiatry Research, compared rates of mood and anxiety disorders between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians or Maori.

Primary Mental Health (International)

Beyond face-to-face individual counseling: A systematic review on alternative modes of motivational interviewing in substance abuse treatment and prevention
This systematic review, published in Addictive Behaviors, aimed to synthesize the evidence on the effectiveness of motivational interviewing (MI), delivered in modes other than face-to-face individual counselling, in preventing and treating substance abuse related behaviours.

Better Help for smokers to Quit (New Zealand)

Evaluation of a smoking cessation service in elective surgery
No best practice service models exist for promoting preoperative smoking cessation support, despite smokers experiencing more perioperative complications than nonsmokers. A novel specialist stop smoking service for patients undergoing elective surgery (called 'ELECT') was established in 2012 in Auckland, New Zealand (NZ). An evaluation of the service was undertaken in 2014 and published in the Journal of Surgical Research.

Better Help for smokers to Quit (International)

A systematic review of smartphone applications for smoking cessation
Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the USA. However, limited data exists regarding smoking cessation mobile app quality and intervention effectiveness. Innovative and scalable interventions are needed to further alleviate the public health implications of tobacco addiction. The proliferation of the smartphone and the advent of mobile phone health interventions have made treatment more accessible than ever. The purpose of this review, published in Translational Behavioral Medicine, was to examine the relation between published scientific literature and available commercial smartphone health apps for smoking cessation to identify the percentage of scientifically supported apps that were commercially available to consumers and to determine how many of the top commercially available apps for smoking cessation were supported by the published scientific literature.

Weight Management (New Zealand)

Food swamps by area socioeconomic deprivation in New Zealand: a national study
A nationwide spatial analysis of community retail food environments in relation to area socioeconomic deprivation was conducted in New Zealand. The results of this analysis were published in the International Journal of Public Health.

Childhood Obesity (New Zealand)

Unhealthy food advertising directed to children on New Zealand television: extent, nature, impact and policy implications
The objective of this study, published in Public Health Nutrition, was to comprehensively assess the extent, nature and impact of unhealthy food advertising targeted to children on New Zealand television.

Childhood Obesity (International)

A Systematic Examination of the Association between Parental and Child Obesity across Countries
Childhood obesity has become a global epidemic. Parents can have an important influence on their children's health behaviours and weight status. Many studies have examined the association between parental and childhood weight status. The purpose of this systematic examination and meta-analysis, published in Advances in Nutrition, was to examine the strength and variation of the Parent-Child association in obesity and to identify factors (e.g., demographic characteristics and country's economic level) that may influence this association.

Counselling parents on young children's healthy diet: a modified scoping review
The aim of this study, published in the Journal of Clinical Nursing, was to map and describe key information in existing research about counselling of parents of children aged 0-2 years on the child's healthy diet in preventive health care settings, particularly in public health nursing.

Oral Health (New Zealand)

The magnitude of Indigenous and non-Indigenous oral health inequalities in Brazil, New Zealand and Australia
The objective of this study, published in the Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology, was to compare the magnitude of relative oral health inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous persons from Brazil, New Zealand and Australia.

Oral Health (International)

Efficacy of an oral health literacy intervention among Indigenous Australian adults
The objective of this study, published in Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology, was to determine the effect of an oral health literacy intervention on oral health literacy-related outcomes among rural-dwelling Indigenous Australian adults.

Key Ministry of Health Publications

Immunisation Handbook 2017
The Immunisation Handbook 2017 (the Handbook) provides clinical guidelines for health professionals on the safest and most effective use of vaccines in their practice. These guidelines are based on the best scientific evidence available at the time of publication, from published and unpublished literature.

The information available on or through this newsletter does not represent Ministry of Health policy. It is intended to provide general information to the health sector and the public, and is not intended to address specific circumstances of any particular individual or entity.