1,858 research outputs found

    Computer programs used in the field of hospital pharmacy for the management of dangerous drugs: systematic review of literature

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    Background: This review wants to highlight the importance of computer programs used to control the steps in the management of dangerous drugs. It must be taken into account that there are phases in the process of handling dangerous medicines in pharmacy services that pose a risk to the healthcare personnel who handle them. Objective: To review the scientific literature to determine what computer programs have been used in the field of hospital pharmacy for the management of dangerous drugs (HDs). Methods: The following electronic databases were searched from inception to July 30, 2021: MEDLINE (via PubMed), Embase, Cochrane Library, Scopus, Web of Science, Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (LILACS) and Medicine in Spanish (MEDES). The following terms were used in the search strategy: "Antineoplastic Agents," "Cytostatic Agents," "Hazardous Substances," "Medical Informatics Applications," "Mobile Applications," "Software," "Software Design," and "Pharmacy Service, Hospital." Results: A total of 104 studies were retrieved form the databases, and 18 additional studies were obtained by manually searching the reference lists of the included studies and by consulting experts. Once the inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied, 26 studies were ultimately included in this review. Most of the applications described in the included studies were used for the management of antineoplastic drugs. The most commonly controlled stage was electronic prescription; 18 studies and 7 interventions carried out in the preparation stage focused on evaluating the accuracy of chemotherapy preparations. Conclusion: Antineoplastic electronic prescription software was the most widely implemented software at the hospital level. No software was found to control the entire HD process. Only one of the selected studies measured safety events in workers who handle HDs. Moreover, health personnel were found to be satisfied with the implementation of this type of technology for daily work with these medications. All studies reviewed herein considered patient safety as their final objective. However, none of the studies evaluated the risk of HD exposure among workers.Partial financial support for translation and publication was received from the Alicante Biomedical and Health Research Institute (ISABIAL).S

    Drug policies in Western Europe

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    A Search for Role Clarity: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the RN and RPN Entry-to-Practice Competencies That Shape Nursing Curriculum in Ontario, Canada

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    There is confusion regarding the practice expectations of Registered Nurses (RN) and Registered Practical Nurses (RPN) for employers, educators, nurses, nursing students, and the public, in Ontario, Canada. As the entry-to-practice competencies (ETPC) serve as a guide to the curricular content of nursing programs, a critical discourse analysis of the entry-to-practice documents available to the public was performed to: 1) attempt to understand the meaning and intent of the ETPC, 2) to answer the question of what are the differences in practice expectations for RN versus RPN graduates, and 3) how can role clarity be improved through this process. Critical discourse analysis affords the opportunity to understand these documents, not just through the words on the page, but understand the social, cultural, political, and contextual forces and processes that led to their creation by the nursing regulators in Canada. However, there are competency interpretation documents available only to nursing educators embarking on the College of Nurses of Ontario (CNO) program approval process, which are not made readily available to nurses, the public or employers. These interpretation documents provide a clearer picture of the key differences and similarities between RN and RPN practice expectations. Despite this increased clarity, some language use and sentence construction confound even a seasoned educator as these words have different meanings depending on the context and common understanding of the meaning. As a useful tool for nursing practice, a table of comparison was made to guide nursing educators, employers, nurses, nursing students, and the public to make visible these differences and similarities in both the competencies and the interpretation documents. This analysis also suggests that the College of Nurses of Ontario make the interpretation documents available to a wider audience to support the link between nursing practice and nursing education to create a living curriculum that can be responsive to the ever-changing needs of the profession

    Plug-in healthcare:Development, ruination, and repair in health information exchange

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    This dissertation explores the work done by people and things in emerging infrastructures for health information exchange. It shows how this work relates to processes of development, production, and growth, as well as to abandonment, ruination, and loss. It argues for a revaluation of repair work: a form of articulation work that attends to gaps and disruptions in the margins of technological development. Often ignored by engineers, policy makers, and researchers, repair sensitizes us to different ways of caring for people and things that do not fit, fall in between categories, and resist social norms and conventions. It reminds us that infrastructures emerge in messy and unevenly distributed sociotechnical configurations, and that technological solutions cannot be simply ‘plugged in’ at will, but require all kinds of work. With that, repair emphasizes the need for more democratic, critical, and reflexive engagements with (and interventions in) health information exchange. Empirically, this study aims to understand how ‘integration’ in health information exchange is done in practice, and to develop concepts and insights that may help us to rethink technological development accordingly. It starts from the premise that the introduction of IT in healthcare is all too often regarded as a neutral process, and as a rational implementation challenge. These widespread views among professionals, managers, and policy makers need to be addressed, as they have very real – and mostly undesirable – consequences. Spanning a period of more than ten years, this study traces the birth and demise of an online regional health portal in the Netherlands (2009-2019). Combining ethnographic research with an experimental form of archive work, it describes sociotechnical networks that expanded, collapsed, and reconfigured around a variety of problems – from access to information and data ownership to business cases, financial sustainability, and regional care. It puts a spotlight on the integration of standards, infrastructures, and users in the portal project, and on elements of collapsing networks that quietly resurfaced elsewhere. The reconstruction of these processes foregrounds different instances of repair work in the portal’s development and subsequent abandonment, repurposing, and erasure. Conceptually, this study contributes to academic debates in health information exchange, including the politics of technology, practices of participatory design, and the role of language in emerging information infrastructures. It latches on to ethnographic studies on information systems and infrastructural work, and brings together insights from actor-network theory, science and technology studies, and figurational sociology to rethink and extend current (reflexive and critical) understandings of technological development. It raises three questions: What work is done in the development and demise of an online health portal? How are relations between people and things shaped in that process? And how can insights from this study help us to understand changing sociotechnical figurations in health information exchange? The final analysis includes five key concepts: the act of building network extensions, the method of tracing phantom networks, the notion of sociotechnical figurations, the logic of plug-in healthcare, and repair as a heuristic device.<br/

    Organisational intelligence and digital government service quality: the mediating role of occupational stress among Malaysian service providers

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    The need to evolve and transform public service has led the public to re-think its approach, and to use technological tools to improve access, efficiency and satisfaction of users. The same scenario has also been observed in the Malaysian public sector, as to how the industrial revolution and COVID-19 pandemic have forcibly led to a greater emphasis on digitalisation initiatives. Today, with more than 50% of Malaysian public services available online (end-toend), digital service quality is to be given more emphasis, as it is the most important determinant in ensuring user satisfaction. Essentially this study seeks to broaden the knowledge of digital services quality in the public sector, due to dissimilarities with the context of the private sector. Additionally, service providers' perspectives such as back-office managementrelated strategies have not been examined to a similar extent as the customers' standpoint. It is also important to note that the role of employee well-being has received very little attention in understanding its importance to service delivery performance. Following this, the study proposed four research objectives to gain a better understanding on the mediating role of occupational stress in addressing the missing link between organisational intelligence (OI) traits, and digital government service quality. By employing multistage cluster sampling, a total of 394 completed survey responses comprising 4 clusters, 30 federal agencies, and 143 digital services were obtained for analysis. Next, all-inclusive strategies for this study were proposed based on the triangulation approach by incorporating a) mediation analysis; b) IPMA approach and c) Tree-Map chart (participants’ feedback) and d) experts' and practitioners’ insights. In principle, OI traits collectively demonstrate a significant direct effect on occupational stress and an indirect effect on digital service quality. Hence, this study proposes areas that require greater attention in sustaining the service quality, particularly the ‘Appetite for Change and Knowledge Deployment’, ‘Alignment and Congruence’, ‘Shared Fate’ and ‘Heart’. Considering the significance of the ‘occupational stress’ factor in the proposed model, this study also presents some practical recommendations in terms of organisation-focused interventions, particularly on the ‘Leadership’, ‘Alignment and Congruence’, and ‘Heart’ to manage occupational stress. At the same time, individual-focused interventions such as training and job crafting are proposed in ensuring the psychological well-being of the service providers. This study hopes that these recommendations will serve as guidance to the Malaysian public sector in sustaining its digital government service performance in the long run

    Endogenous measures for contextualising large-scale social phenomena: a corpus-based method for mediated public discourse

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    This work presents an interdisciplinary methodology for developing endogenous measures of group membership through analysis of pervasive linguistic patterns in public discourse. Focusing on political discourse, this work critiques the conventional approach to the study of political participation, which is premised on decontextualised, exogenous measures to characterise groups. Considering the theoretical and empirical weaknesses of decontextualised approaches to large-scale social phenomena, this work suggests that contextualisation using endogenous measures might provide a complementary perspective to mitigate such weaknesses. This work develops a sociomaterial perspective on political participation in mediated discourse as affiliatory action performed through language. While the affiliatory function of language is often performed consciously (such as statements of identity), this work is concerned with unconscious features (such as patterns in lexis and grammar). This work argues that pervasive patterns in such features that emerge through socialisation are resistant to change and manipulation, and thus might serve as endogenous measures of sociopolitical contexts, and thus of groups. In terms of method, the work takes a corpus-based approach to the analysis of data from the Twitter messaging service whereby patterns in users’ speech are examined statistically in order to trace potential community membership. The method is applied in the US state of Michigan during the second half of 2018—6 November having been the date of midterm (i.e. non-Presidential) elections in the United States. The corpus is assembled from the original posts of 5,889 users, who are nominally geolocalised to 417 municipalities. These users are clustered according to pervasive language features. Comparing the linguistic clusters according to the municipalities they represent finds that there are regular sociodemographic differentials across clusters. This is understood as an indication of social structure, suggesting that endogenous measures derived from pervasive patterns in language may indeed offer a complementary, contextualised perspective on large-scale social phenomena

    Buncombe Street Administrative Board Minutes 1981-1985

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