Changing attitudes to infection management in primary care: a controlled trial of active versus passive guideline implementation strategies.

Background And Objectives: When attempting to implement evidence-based medicine, such as through clinical guidelines, we often rely on passive educational tactics, for example didactic lectures and bulletins. These methods involve the recipient in relatively superficial processing of information, and any consequent attitude changes can be expected to be short-lived. However, active methods, such as practice-based discussion, should involve recipients in deep processing, with more enduring attitude changes.

Relation between mouth and haematogenous infection in total joint replacements.

Objective: To investigate the source of infections associated with orthopaedic prostheses.

Design: Analysis of four infections of prosthetic joints with case records; minimum inhibitory and minimum bactericidal concentrations and sodium dodecylsulphate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis of the cell wall polypeptides of the Streptococcus sanguis isolates from the mouth and infected prostheses; examination of the patients' mouths for periodontal disease and caries.

Subjects: Four adults (three men) aged 58-83.

HLA class II polymorphism and IDDM susceptibility in the Greek population.

The frequencies of HLA-DQA1, DQB1 and DRB1 alleles were compared between 50 Insulin-Dependent Diabetes Melitus (IDDM) patients and 49 healthy controls in the Greek population. Statistically significant difference in the frequencies of HLA-DQA1*0501-DQB1*0201 (P = 10(-4)), DQA1*0301-DQB1*0201 (P = 0.01) and DQA1*0301-DQB1*0302 (P = 0.

Motivation to comply with infection control procedures.

This paper addresses the critical issue of motivating hospital staff to comply with standard infection control procedures. Previous psychological assessment of infection control knowledge, attitudes and behaviour has indicated that the reasons for non-compliance are very basic and reflect inter alia a low perception of the importance of the measures and a lack of motivation. It is argued that, although staff have a theoretical awareness of the value of complying with such procedures, in practice these seem to have a low priority.