Publications by authors named "Aman Nijjar"
Background: Many seriously ill hospitalized patients have cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) as part of their care plan, but CPR is unlikely to achieve the goals of many seriously ill hospitalized patients.
Objective: To determine if a multicomponent decision support intervention changes documented orders for CPR in the medical record, compared to usual care.
Design: Open-label randomized controlled trial.
Background: The effect of a multi-faceted handoff strategy in a high volume internal medicine inpatient setting on process and patient outcomes has not been clearly established. We set out to determine if a multi-faceted handoff intervention consisting of education, standardized handoff procedures, including fixed time and location for face-to-face handoff would result in improved rates of handoff compared with usual practice. We also evaluated resident satisfaction, health resource utilization and clinical outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Decisions about care options and the use of life-sustaining treatments should be informed by a person's values and treatment preferences. The objective of this study was to examine the consistency of ratings of the importance of the values statements and the association between values statement ratings and the patient's expressed treatment preference.
Methods: We conducted a multi-site survey in 20 family practices.
Background: Physicians are often called to evaluate patients overnight with varying levels of clinical deterioration. Early warning scores predict critical clinical deterioration in patients; however, it is unknown whether they are able to reliably predict which patients will need to be seen overnight and whether these patients will require further resource use.
Methods: A prospective case cohort study of 522 patient nights in a single tertiary care hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, was conducted to assess the ability of Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS) and National Early Warning Score (NEWS) to predict patients who will need to be seen overnight by physicians and will require other healthcare resources.
Importance: Seriously ill hospitalized patients have identified communication and decision making about goals of care as high priorities for quality improvement in end-of-life care. Interventions to improve care are more likely to succeed if tailored to existing barriers.
Objective: To determine, from the perspective of hospital-based clinicians, (1) barriers impeding communication and decision making about goals of care with seriously ill hospitalized patients and their families and (2) their own willingness and the acceptability for other clinicians to engage in this process.
Objective: Type 2 diabetes mellitus is a clear prognostic marker for increased cardiovascular morbidity and mortality after acute myocardial infarction (AMI). We compared diabetes patients based on therapy used (no pharmacotherapy, those prescribed oral antihyperglycemic agents and those prescribed insulin) on the composite risk of recurrent AMI, congestive heart failure and mortality among elderly patients with AMI.
Methods: Using administrative data, we identified patients, aged 65 years and older, with an incident AMI hospitalization in British Columbia and the Calgary Health Region between April 1, 1995, and March 31, 2002, for a retrospective cohort study.
Aims: We sought to determine whether there are differences in health resource utilization among South Asian (SA), Chinese and White patients with newly diagnosed diabetes mellitus.
Methods: We used province-wide administrative data from British Columbia, Canada (1997-2006) to determine proportion of patients with ≥2 visits/year for all outpatient and family physician (FP) visits, proportion of patients with at least one annual visit to specialists, ophthalmology/optometry and hospital admissions by ethnic group.
Results: There were 9529 South Asian, 14,084 Chinese and 143,630 White patients with newly diagnosed diabetes in the study.
Background: South Asians have a high prevalence of ischemic heart disease and experience high incident acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rates at younger ages than their white counterparts. The aim of this study was to compare outcomes after AMI in a Canadian population of South Asian and white patients, aged 20 to 55 years.
Methods: Using hospital discharge abstract administrative data, we included patients with incident AMI, residing in British Columbia and the Calgary Health Region, between April 1, 1995 and March 31, 2002.
Background: As populations in Western countries continue to change in their ethnic composition, there is a need for regular surveillance of diseases that have previously shown some health disparities. Earlier data have already demonstrated high rates of cardiovascular mortality among South Asians and relatively lower rates among people of Chinese descent. The aim of this study was to describe the differences in the incidence of hospitalized acute myocardial infarction (AMI) among the three largest ethnic groups in British Columbia (BC), Canada.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The aim of this study was to determine whether South Asian patients with diabetes have a worse prognosis following hospitalization for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) compared with their White counterparts. We measured the risk of developing a composite cardiovascular outcome of recurrent AMI, congestive heart failure (CHF) requiring hospitalization, or death, in these two groups.
Methods: Using hospital administrative data, we performed a retrospective cohort study of 41,615 patients with an incident AMI in British Columbia and the Calgary Health Region between April 1, 1995, and March 31, 2002.