The COVID-19 pandemic had a substantial impact on healthcare delivery, particularly in general practice. This study aimed to evaluate how dispensing of medications in primary care in Ireland changed following the COVID-19 pandemic's onset compared to expected trends. This interrupted time series study used data on medications prescribed in general practice 2016-2022 to patient eligible for state health cover, approximately one third of the population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact across primary care. Primary care services have seen an upheaval, and more and more patients are engaging in telephone consultations in order to maintain social distancing. In the present study, we seek to quantify the effect of the pandemic on primary care prescribing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFam Med Community Health
June 2020
Objective: In the present study, we sought to explore the relationship between socioeconomic status and prescribing magnitude and cost in primary care throughout Northern Ireland.
Design: We performed a retrospective data analysis of general practitioner (GP) prescribing using open-source databases with data collected from May to October 2019 to determine the number of prescriptions and cost of drugs and drug classes by area, ranking these by deprivation index. We used Kendall's tau to quantify the relationship between prescribing and deprivation.
Introduction: Effective treatment for severe ischemic stroke continues to be largely an unmet medical need. Using a nonvascular (paravascular cerebrospinal fluid) pathway to provide oxygen and nutrients to ischemic tissues may be a means of treating this disease. The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the safety and technical feasibility of ventriculo-lumbar perfusion with the oxygenated fluorocarbon nutrient emulsion (OFNE) perfusion system in the treatment of patients with severe hemispheric cerebral ischemia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To ascertain whether ventriculosubarachnoid perfusion of the brain with an oxygen-carrying nutrient emulsion affects the volume of infarction in animals with permanent middle cerebral artery occlusion.
Design: Prospective, randomized, controlled trial.
Setting: An animal laboratory in a university setting.