Questionnaire survey of working relationships between nurses and doctors in University Teaching Hospitals in Southern Nigeria

BACKGROUND: Smooth working relationships between nurses and doctors are necessary for efficient health care delivery. However, previous studies have shown that this is often absent with negative impact on the quality of health care delivery. In 2002, we studied factors that affect nurse-doctor working relationships in University Teaching Hospitals (UTH) in Southern Nigeria in order to characterize it and identify managerial and training needs that might be used to improve it. METHOD: Questionnaire survey of doctors and nurses working in four UTH in Southern Nigeria was done in 2002. The setting and subjects were selected by random sampling procedures. Information on factors in domains of work, union activities, personnel and hospital management were studied using closed and open-ended questionnaires. RESULTS: Nurse-doctor working relationships were statistically significantly affected by poor after-work social interaction, staff shortages, activist unionism, disregard for one's profession, and hospital management and government policies. In general, nurses had better opinion of doctors' work than doctors had about nurses' work. CONCLUSION: Working relationships between doctors and nurses need to be improved through improved training and better working conditions, creation of better working environment, use of alternative methods of conflict resolution and balanced hospital management and government policies. This will improve the retention of staff, job satisfaction and efficiency of health care delivery in Nigeria

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead