Pharmacist-led management of chronic pain in primary care:results from a randomised controlled exploratory trial

To compare the effectiveness of pharmacist medication review, with or without pharmacist prescribing, with standard care, for patients with chronic pain

Implementing PODS (Patient Oriented Discharge Summary) in an acute medical urban health setting in Vancouver, Canada

The transition from hospital to home or community is a vulnerable time for patients and families, who face risks associated with misunderstanding instructions about medications, self-monitoring and when to seek emergency care. The quality of the discharge process can have a significant impact on patient confidence, overall patient experience, ability to manage health at home, and hospital readmission rates. Patient Oriented Discharge Summary (PODS) is a standardized form and set of process changes, utilized to overcome communication barriers faced at discharge. We implemented PODS in two Acute Medicine units of a tertiary care hospital in western Canada and used a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the four process changes (PODS form, use of teach-back, engagement of caregivers in discharge teaching, follow-up phone calls). Evaluation showed that 60% of patients received PODS and 87% found the form helpful. There was a large increase in the percentage of patients who felt adequately prepared at the time of discharge, and a 10% increase in the number of patients who rated their overall hospital experience positively. Healthcare providers reported that using PODS they were more confident that patients were adequately prepared to return home. The update of PODS on the implementation units has been sustained at 60% for 18 months. Implementation of the PODS form and process can be accomplished with an interdisciplinary team, leadership support and by working closely with Patient Family Partners. PODS can improve the discharge process even in the complex urban acute medical environment in ways that offer wide-reaching benefits. Experience Framework This article is associated with the Quality & Clinical Excellence lens of The Beryl Institute Experience Framework (https://www.theberylinstitute.org/ExperienceFramework). Access other PXJ articles related to this lens. Access other resources related to this lens

Support for developing personalized genomic medicine

This article discusses the benefits of personalized genomic medicine, some of the challenges of adoption into the clinic, and provides examples of UK and European projects that are developing the practice of personalized genomic medicine. It highlights the work of the UK Pharmacogenetics and Stratified Medicine Network in providing information, developing multidisciplinary collaborations, and organizing events, to support the advancement of personalized genomic medicine

The HAIRCUT System at TREC-9

he token stream. The text was lowercased, punctuation was removed, and diacritical marks were retained. Tokens containing digits were preserved; however only the first two of a sequence of digits were retained (e.g., 1920 became 19##). The result is a stream of blank-separated words. When using n-grams we construct indexing terms from the same sequence of words. These n-grams may span word boundaries; an attempt is made to discover sentence boundaries so that n-grams spanning sentence boundaries are not recorded. Thus n-grams with leading, central, or trailing spaces are formed at word boundaries. Queries were parsed in the same fashion as were documents with two exceptions. On some of our title only runs we attempted to correct the spelling of words that did not occur in our dictionary. Also, we tried to remove stop structure from the description and narrative sections of the queries using a list of about 1000 phrases constructed from past TREC topic statements. # docs # terms ind