Patient safety indicators for England from hospital administrative data: case-control analysis and comparison with US data

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.The Healthcare Commission received a small grant from the Health and Social Care Information Centre to support the initial recoding work

Vaccinations, infections and antibacterials in the first grass pollen season of life and risk of later hayfever

Published source: Bremner, S. A., Carey, I. M., DeWilde, S., Richards, N., Maier, W. C., Hilton, S. R., Strachan, D. P. and Cook, D. G. (2007), Vaccinations, infections and antibacterials in the first grass pollen season of life and risk of later hayfever. Clinical & Experimental Allergy, 37: 512–517. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2222.2007.02697.

Commuting Quantum Circuits with Few Outputs are Unlikely to be Classically Simulatable

We study the classical simulatability of commuting quantum circuits with n input qubits and O(log n) output qubits, where a quantum circuit is classically simulatable if its output probability distribution can be sampled up to an exponentially small additive error in classical polynomial time. First, we show that there exists a commuting quantum circuit that is not classically simulatable unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses to the third level. This is the first formal evidence that a commuting quantum circuit is not classically simulatable even when the number of output qubits is exponentially small. Then, we consider a generalized version of the circuit and clarify the condition under which it is classically simulatable. Lastly, we apply the argument for the above evidence to Clifford circuits in a similar setting and provide evidence that such a circuit augmented by a depth-1 non-Clifford layer is not classically simulatable. These results reveal subtle differences between quantum and classical computation.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures; v2: Theorems 1 and 3 improved, proofs modifie

Coping with Persistent Pain, Effectiveness Research into Self-management (COPERS): statistical analysis plan for a randomised controlled trial

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated

A protocol paper: community engagement interventions for cardiovascular disease prevention in socially disadvantaged populations in the UK: an implementation research study

Background: Cardiovascular disorders (CVD) are the single greatest cause of mortality worldwide. In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) has launched an initiative of health checks over and above current care to tackle CVD. However, the uptake of Health Checks is poor in disadvantaged communities. This protocol paper sets out a UK-based study (Sussex and Nottingham) aiming to co-produce a community delivered CVD risk assessment and coaching intervention to support community members to reduce their risk of CVD. The overall aim of the project is to implement a tailored-to-context community engagement (CE) intervention on awareness of CVD risks in vulnerable populations in high, middle and low-income countries. The specific objectives of the study are to enhance stakeholder' engagement; to implement lifestyle interventions for cardiovascular primary prevention, in disadvantaged populations and motivate uptake of NHS health checks. Methods: This study uses both qualitative and quantitative methods in three phases of evaluation, including pre-, per-and post-implementation. To ensure contextual appropriateness the 'Scaling-up Packages of Interventions for Cardiovascular disease prevention in selected sites in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa: An implementation research' (SPICES) project will organize a multi-component community-engagement intervention. For the qualitative component, the pre-implementation phase will involve a contextual assessment and stakeholder mapping, exploring potentials for CVD risk profiling strategies and led by trained Community Health Volunteers (CHV) to identify accessibility and acceptability. The per-implementation phase will involve healthy lifestyle counselling provided by CHVs and evaluation of the outcome to identify fidelity and scalability. The post-implementation phase will involve developing sustainable community-based strategies for CVD risk reduction. All three components will include a process evaluation. A stepped wedge cluster randomised trial of the roll out will focus on implementation outcomes including uptake and engagement and changes in risk profiles. The quantitative component includes pre and post-intervention surveys. The theory of the socio-ecological framework will be applied to analyse the community engagement approach. Discussion: Based on the results ultimately a sustainable community engagement-based strategy for the primary prevention of CVD risk will be developed to enhance the performance of NHS health care in the UK. The Trial Registration number is ISRCTN68334579

Outdoor air pollution and respiratory health in patients with COPD

Cannot archive published pdf, only submitted/accepted version of the article. Full version published by BMJ Publishing Group Ltd (& BTS) under licence. First published by Thorax Online, on April 1, 2011. Doi:10.1136/thx.2010.155358

A comparison of the recording of 30 common childhood conditions in the Doctor's Independent Network and General Practice Research Databases.

In this article we compare the recording of 30 common childhood conditions in two general practice databases of anonymised computerised medical records based on fundamentally different systems--the Doctor's Independent Network (DIN) database (Torex system) and the General Practice Research Database (GPRD) (In Practice Systems). Analysing the records of all children born 1990-1993 and followed for 5 years we found comparable results for most conditions, but differences between the hierarchical structures of the diagnostic coding systems (Read in DIN, OXMIS in GPRD) led to some differences between the databases. Practice variation was marked, but comparable between databases. Variation was greatest in conditions that are poorly defined clinically