Effects of care pathways on the in-hospital treatment of heart failure: a systematic review.

Background: Care pathways have become a popular tool to enhance the quality of care by improving patient outcomes, promoting patient safety, increasing patient satisfaction, and optimizing the use of resources. We performed a disease specific systematic review to determine how care pathways in the hospital treatment of heart failure affect in-hospital mortality, length of in-hospital stay, readmission rate and hospitalisation cost when compared with standard care.

Methods: Medline, Cinahl, Embase and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials were searched from 1985 to 2010.

Personality traits and psychosocial adjustment of patients with burns.

Existing literature demonstrates a relationship between selected personality traits and coping, a relationship explored here in a sample of 61 male Israeli patients with burns. Successful coping was assessed by the 5-item Satisfaction With Life Scale and 2 single-item measures of adjustment to the specific injury. Results suggest that adjustment to the traumatic experience of a burn injury is strongly related to specific personality traits rather than to the physical features of the injury.

Relationship between the basic personality inventory and the NEO-Personality Inventory in a nonpatient sample.

The relation between psychopathology measured by Jackson's 1989 Basic Personality Inventory and personality dimensions measured by Costa and McCrae's 1985 NEO-Personality Inventory was investigated in a nonpatient sample of 457 female subjects. The results contribute to the validation of both instruments and agree with the relevant findings reported in the literature. They also provide support for the cross-cultural invariance of these instruments.

Millon MCMI Scales Factor Analyzed and Correlated with MMPI and CPS Scales.

The Millon MCMI was administered in translation to 527 applicants for drivers' licenses in Israel who were required to undergo psychological screening. Three hundred of these subjects also took the Comrey Personality Scales (CPS) and the other 227 also took the MMPI. A factor analysis of the 20 MCMI scales was carried out and these scales were also correlated with the CPS and MMPI scales.

On the Location of the Sensation Seeking construct in the Personality Domain.

The purpose of the study was to examine the location of Zuckerman's sensation seeking (SS) construct in the personality domain as measured by Cattell's 16 personality factors (16PF). The results of the factor analytic study indicated that the global construct of sensation seeking is related to the broad personality factor of independence. When the Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS) was divided into subscales, relations with two other broader personality factors, superego and pathemia, emerged as well.