Use of Apfel Simplified Risk Score to Guide Postoperative Nausea and Vomiting Prophylaxis in Adult Patients Undergoing Same-day Surgery.

Purpose: The quality improvement (QI) project implemented a postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV) risk screening tool and introduced a risk-tailored prophylactic guideline to identify patients at risk for PONV and aimed to minimize PONV adverse events.

Design: This project represents the initial PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) cycle for quality improvement with use of a pre-post design with two independent groups designed to compare PONV rates before and after implementation of an Apfel Simplified Risk Score screening and prophylactic guideline intervention.

Methods: The project implemented the screening of patient PONV risk using the Apfel Simplified Risk Score and a combination antiemetic drug class prophylactic guideline for adult patients undergoing elective same-day surgery procedures.

Plasmonic core-shell nanostructure as an optical photoactive nanolens for enhanced light harvesting and hydrogen production.

Hydrogen production using plasmonic photocatalyst has attracted increasing attention since it improves light harvesting and photoefficiency. Herein, we have designed a plasmonic photocatalyst in a core-shell nanostructure that enabled an improvement of light harvesting and photocatalytic production of hydrogen using a very low amount of gold nanoparticles. The core-shell nanostructure was found to mimic the focusing of light observed for the lens-like epidermal cells.