Palliative care at home: general practitioners working with palliative care teams.

Home care is the preferred option for most people with a terminal illness. Providing home care relies on good community-based services, and a general practice workforce competent in palliative care practice and willing to accommodate patients' needs. Structured palliative care training of general practitioners is needed at undergraduate and postgraduate level, with attention to barriers to teamwork and communication.

Comparison of serum sodium and chloride results for Flame IV-Auto Analyzer II, SMAC, Ektachem 400, and Nova 4 clinical analyzer systems.

We determined serum Na+ and Cl- results using Technicon's Flame IV-Auto Analyzer II (FLIV/AAII) system and Kodak's Ektachem 400 clinical analyzer. Our objective was to determine whether Na+ and Cl- results from these analyzers were sufficiently similar to report to clinicians without reference to the system used for the determination. Method precision of the two systems for Na+ results was comparable; whereas Ektachem 400 Cl- results were more imprecise than those determined using the FLIV/AAII, Ektachem Na+ results showed lower correlation with the FLIV/AAII (r = 0.

Comparison of precision for the Kodak Ektachem 400 and Technicon AutoAnalyzer II creatinine methods.

We have evaluated the precision of the Ektachem 400 thin film enzymic creatinine method and compared it to that obtained for an AutoAnalyzer II (AAII) picric acid procedure. The results of the study show that the Ektachem method yields imprecise creatinine values over the low concentration range (40-240 mumol/L). Run-to-run precision estimates at a creatinine concentration of 225 mumol/L (by AAII) yielded CV's of 9.

Continuous-flow enzymic determination of serum total and high density lipoprotein cholesterol using microlitre sample volumes.

We determine serum total cholesterol and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) using a modified Technicon Auto Analyzer II-BMC enzymic system. The method uses 25 microL of sample (serum or supernate) for cholesterol determinations. Pooled serum which was calibrated indirectly against CDC's Abell-Kendall method was used for standardization.

Continuous-flow enzymatic determination of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol.

A simple, sensitive, and precise continuous-flow (Technicon Auto Analyser II) method using enzymic reagents to measure high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol in the supernatant of serum treated with heparin-manganese reagent is described. 1. The sensitivity of the system was improved by increasing the flow rates of both sample and re-sample manifold lines to 0.