Understanding the contribution of general medical services to acute inpatient care in Victorian public hospitals.

Background: General medicine is an integral part of health services, yet there is little data highlighting their contribution to acute hospital care in Australia.

Aims: To utilise the Victorian Department of Health's administrative dataset for hospital admissions to evaluate the relative contribution and trends over time of general medical services to acute multiday inpatient hospital separations in the Victorian public healthcare system.

Methods: A retrospective time-series study of general medical activity compared to other major specialties using hospital-level data provided by the Department of Health: (i) extrapolation from diagnosis-related group (DRG) activity data (2011-2021) and, (ii) directly reported discharge unit-based activity (available from 2018).

Reducing medication errors in hospital discharge summaries: a randomised controlled trial.

Objectives: To evaluate whether pharmacists completing the medication management plan in the medical discharge summary reduced the rate of medication errors in these summaries.

Design: Unblinded, cluster randomised, controlled investigation of medication management plans for patients discharged after an inpatient stay in a general medical unit.

Setting: The Alfred Hospital, an adult major referral hospital in metropolitan Melbourne, with an annual emergency department attendance of about 60000 patients.

A feasibility study of the provision of a personalized interdisciplinary audiovisual summary to facilitate care transfer care at hospital discharge: Care Transfer Video (CareTV).

Objective: To assess the feasibility and patient acceptance of a personalized interdisciplinary audiovisual record to facilitate effective communication with patients, family, carers and other healthcare workers at hospital discharge.

Design: Descriptive pilot study utilizing a study-specific patient feedback questionnaire conducted from October 2013 to June 2014.

Setting And Participants: Twenty General Medical inpatients being discharged from an Acute General Medical Ward in a metropolitan teaching hospital.

Prevalence, associations, and risk factors for orthostatic hypotension in medical, surgical, and trauma inpatients: an observational cohort study.

Background: Orthostatic hypotension (OH) is prevalent in hospitalized elderly patients. It is defined as a reduction in systolic blood pressure (SBP) of at least 20 mmHg and/or diastolic blood pressure (DBP) of at least 10 mmHg within 3 minutes of standing from a lying position. This observational cohort study describes the prevalence, association with symptoms, and risk factors for OH in medical, surgical, and trauma wards in a tertiary hospital and the differences in hemodynamic behaviors between OH-positive (OHP) and OH-negative (OHN) patients.

Treatment of intractable painful diabetic neuropathy with intravenous lignocaine.

Objective: Lignocaine is a cardiac antiarrhythmic agent occasionally used to treat neuropathic pain. This study was designed to examine the effectiveness of intravenous lignocaine in patients with intractable painful diabetic neuropathy.

Research Design And Methods: Fifteen patients with painful diabetic peripheral neuropathy, who had appeared to respond to previous lignocaine infusions, completed a double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover trial of two doses of intravenous lignocaine (5 and 7.