Barriers to Accurate Blood Pressure Measurement in the Medical Office.

Background: Despite the high prevalence of blood pressure (BP) measurement errors in the outpatient setting, little is known about why primary care clinics struggle to achieve consistently accurate BP measurements in routine practice. We investigated barriers affecting measurement of BP for adult patients in primary care.

Methods: We conducted a qualitative evaluation in 6 adult primary care clinics.

Long-Term Impacts Faced by Patients and Families After Harmful Healthcare Events.

Background: Patients and families report experiencing a multitude of harms from medical errors resulting in physical, emotional, and financial hardships. Little is known about the duration and nature of these harms and the type of support needed to promote patient and family healing after such events. We sought to describe the long-term impacts (LTIs) reported by patients and family members who experienced harmful medical events 5 or more years ago.

Patients as Partners in Learning from Unexpected Events.

Importance: Patient safety experts believe that patients/family members should be involved in adverse event review. However, it is unclear how aware patients/family members are about the causes of adverse events they experienced.

Objective: To determine whether patients/family members interviewed could identify at least one contributing factor for the event they experienced.

Haemorheological changes in African breast cancer patients.

Several studies have indicated the existence of thrombo-embolic complications in cancer patients and that this could be associated with changes in heamorheological parameters. Packed cell volume (PCV), heamoglobin (Hb), relative plasma viscosity (RPV) and plasma Fibrinogen concentration (PFC) were measured in 50 healthy control women, 50 age-matched women with breast cancer, and 10 women with histophathologically proven benign breast tumour. There were significant differences between the controls and breast cancer patients in all the parameters measured (p < 0.

Haemorheological and fibrinolytic activity in hypertensive Nigerians.

Hypertension is the most significant cardiovascular risk factor to emerge in developing countries. 64 hypertensives (40 old hypertensives and 18 newly diagnosed hypertensives) and 40 age and sex matched normotensives controls were studied. Plasma fibrinogen concentration (PFC), euglobulin lysis time (ELT) and relative plasma viscosity (RPV) and relative whole blood viscosity (RWBV) were estimated.