Student nurses' experiences of community-based practice placement learning: a qualitative exploration.

United Kingdom (UK) health policy has adopted an increasing community and primary care focus over recent years (Department of Health, 1997; Department of Health, 1999. Making a Difference: Strengthening the Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visitor Contribution to Health and Health Care. Department of Health, London; Department of Health, 2004.

[Detection of excessive chronic alcoholic consumption and control of withdrawal. Comparative study of respective values of the mean red-cell volume and serum gamma-glutamyl-transferase activity].

The routine detection of chronic alcoholism is necessary during any medical examination whether private or in hospital, or in occupational medicine. The practitionner now has available a simple reliable and cheap test. It consists of the serum estimation of gamma-glutamyl-transferase (gammaGT) and interpretation of the average red cell volume supplied by automatic counting of the red cell.

[Compared efficiency of mean corpuscular volume (MCV) and serum gamma-glutamyltransferase (gamma-GT) as screening tests for excess-ethanol drinkers (author's transl)].

53 percent of ethanol drinkers had, before detoxication, a gamma-GT higher than the upper limit of the reference interval at the 2.5 percent risk level (36 mU/ml). 44 percent had a mean corpuscular volume (MCV) higher than the limit (99.

[Decrease in serum gamma-glutamyltranspeptidase following abstention from alcohol in cirrhotics (author transl)].

Gamma-Glutamyltranspeptidase activity of patients having an ascitic cirrhosis due to ethanol consumption is high (139 mU/ml) when the patient is still drinking at the time of the assay; it is lower when the patient had stopped drinking at least two months before the assay (49 mU/ml). On the other hand, in 10 patients out of the 11 who submitted to a second assay gamma-glutamyltranspeptidase decreases as soon as the patient abstains from alcohol. In 4 abstinent patients re-examined one year after the first measurement, the gamma-glutamyltranspeptidase activity had decreased to the reference values of Szasz.

[Use of the measurement of gamma-glutamyltranspeptidase activity in serum to determine the success of cures for alcohol detoxification (author's transl)].

44 patients were studied during a 2-year period following a cure for alcohol detoxification. 29 patients (group A) did not start drinking again while 15 relapsed less than one year after their cure (group R). The average gamma GT activity (m) in mU per ml serum was, in group A, 148 (standard deviation, S.