Impact of long-stay beds on the performance of a tertiary hospital in emergencies.

Objective: To assess the impact of implementing long-stay beds for patients of low complexity and high dependency in small hospitals on the performance of an emergency referral tertiary hospital.

Methods: For this longitudinal study, we identified hospitals in three municipalities of a regional department of health covered by tertiary care that supplied 10 long-stay beds each. Patients were transferred to hospitals in those municipalities based on a specific protocol.

Do psychiatric comorbidities predict postoperative seizure outcome in temporal lobe epilepsy surgery?

Clinical and demographic presurgical variables may be associated with unfavorable postsurgical neurological outcome in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy with hippocampal sclerosis (MTLE-HS). However, few reports include preoperative psychiatric disorders as a factor predictive of long-term postsurgical MTLE-HS neurological outcome. We used Engel's criteria to follow 186 postsurgical patients with MTLE-HS for an average of 6 years.