The Future of Computerized Decision Support in Critical Care

book chapterBiomedical Informatic

Patient-Monitoring Systems

book chapterBiomedical Informatic

Patient-Monitoring Systems

book chapterBiomedical Informatic

Computerized ICU Data Management Pitfalls and Promises

journal articleBiomedical Informatic

Essentialism as a form of resistance: An ethnography of gender dynamics in contemporary home births

Feminist scholars have criticised the essentialist construction of femininity associated with ‘natural’ childbirth movements. Along these debates, planned midwife-attended home births stand as the typical representation of this counterculture. In this article, we present data from a multi-sited ethnography on Portuguese home births where we analyse how gender ideologies are reproduced and operationalised by families and home birth professionals. Our findings illustrate how home birth care and associated practices are configuring apparently contradicting gender ideologies. Essentialist perspectives, which conceive birth as an opportunity to reconnect with women's oppressed femininity, coexist with non-binary conceptions of gender, where masculinity and femininity are regarded as fluid forms of energy that everyone has in different degrees, and where men are potentially welcomed in the birth setting, either as fathers or as professionals. Given the androcentric references of modern obstetrics and the marginal position of home birth, we argue that essentialism was constructed as a form of resistance.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

STAT-HI: A Socio-Technical Assessment Tool for Health Informatics Implementations

This paper proposes a socio-technical assessment tool (STAT-HI) for health informatics implementations. We explore why even projects allegedly using sound methodologies repeatedly fail to give adequate attention to socio-technical issues, and we present an initial draft of a structured assessment tool for health informatics implementation that encapsulates socio-technical good practice. Further work is proposed to enrich and validate the proposed instrument. This proposal was presented for discussion at a meeting of the UK Faculty of Health Informatics in December 2009

Role of fine-needle aspiration cytology and core biopsy in the preoperative diagnosis of screen-detected breast carcinoma

Core biopsy (CB) has now largely replaced fine-needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) in the preoperative assessment of breast cancer in the UK. We studied the contribution of FNAC and CB in the preoperative diagnosis of screen-detected breast carcinoma. Data were prospectively collected on 150 840 women who underwent breast screening over a 4-year period from 1999 to 2003. Data on women who had both FNAC and CB taken from the same lesion preoperatively and in whom surgical excision of the lesion subsequently confirmed malignancy was analysed. In 763 cancers, FNAC was inadequate (C1) in 8% and benign (C2) in 10%. Most of these cases presented with microcalcification (25% were C1 or C2). Core biopsy was not representative (B1) or benign (B2) in 7%. The absolute and complete sensitivities were 65 and 82% for FNAC and 80 and 93% for CB in the diagnosis of cancer. Core biopsy was abnormal (B3 or above) in 86% of the cancers missed by FNAC and FNAC was abnormal (C3 or above) in 65% of those missed by CB. Core biopsy is better than FNAC at preoperative diagnosis of screen-detected breast cancer as it missed fewer cancers. However, combining FNAC resulted in a better preoperative diagnosis rate