Important features of hospitals, intensive care unit waiting rooms, and patient care rooms: perspectives of intensive care unit visitors.

Purpose: Family members of critically ill patients spend significant periods of time in the intensive care unit (ICU) and hospital environment. We aimed to identify what services, resources, and conveniences are important to adult ICU visitors.

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study including visitors in four adult ICUs in the province of Ontario, Canada.

Patient safety incident analysis in healthcare: a novel curricular session for medical students.

Patient safety incident analysis is a tool which allows for the identification of and learning from patient safety incidents, which are common in healthcare settings. The University of Toronto introduced a patient safety incident analysis session for graduating medical students in the form of a lecture and subsequent student presentations of incident analyses. Student respondents to evaluation rated the session highly and felt that feedback on their presentations was helpful to reinforce material.

How artificial intelligence can help us 'Choose Wisely'.

The overuse of low value medical tests and treatments drives costs and patient harm. Efforts to address overuse, such as Choosing Wisely campaigns, typically rely on passive implementation strategies- a form of low reliability system change. Embedding guidelines into clinical decision support (CDS) software is a higher leverage approach to provide ordering suggestions through an interface embedded within the clinical workflow.

Medical education advances and innovations: A silver lining during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted healthcare processes substantially including medical education, necessitating several changes along the spectrum of medical training. While this crisis presents major challenges to medical education, it is also an immense opportunity for innovation. In this commentary, Canadian medical students cast a spotlight on four domains of Canadian medical education which have seen substantial changes during the COVID-19 pandemic: medical school admissions, pre-clerkship content delivery, virtual care and telemedicine curricula, and the residency matching process.

Adapting medical education during crisis: Student-Faculty partnerships as an enabler of success.

Restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic have required medical educators to reimagine almost every aspect of undergraduate medical training, including curriculum delivery and assessments in a short timeline. In this personal view article, executive members of the University of Toronto medical student government and Faculty leads of pre-clerkship and clerkship education highlight five practical ways in which a student-Faculty partnership enabled the rapid and smooth adaptation of curricula during the COVID-19 pandemic. These included involving students as partners in decision making to contribute learner perspectives early, agile and collaborative meeting structures, frequent and consistent communication with the student body, providing learners with Faculty perspectives from the frontlines, and striking a balance in the level of feedback collected from students.

Health Forums and Twitter for Dementia Research: Opportunities and Considerations.

Background/objectives: Social media platforms are promising sources for large quantities of participant-driven research data and circumvent some common challenges when conducting dementia research. This study provides a summary of key considerations and recommendations about using these platforms as research tools for dementia.

Design: Mixed methods.

Proton Pump Inhibitors in the Elderly Hospitalized Patient: Evaluating Appropriate Use and Deprescribing.

Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) are often prescribed for elderly patients without appropriate indication, or for longer durations than recommended. To review appropriateness of PPI use prior to and in hospital, and deprescribing rates across different hospital units. Retrospective analysis of patients ≥65 years admitted to 5 acute care units: intensive care unit, acute care for elderly, orthopedics, surgery, and medicine.

What Is Known About Preventing, Detecting, and Reversing Prescribing Cascades: A Scoping Review.

Objectives: To systematically describe the resources available on preventing, detecting, and reversing prescribing cascades using a scoping review methodology.

Measurements: We searched Medline, EMBASE, PsychINFO, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, and Sociological Abstracts from inception until July 2017. Other searches (Google Scholar, hand searches) and expert consultations were performed for resources examining how to prevent, detect, or reverse prescribing cascades.

Systematic Review of Sex-Specific Reporting of Data: Cholinesterase Inhibitor Example.

Objectives: To improve the value of research for older adults, we examine sex-specific reporting of data from drug trials for the management of dementia. These data are important because they may influence considerations ranging from the health of populations to shared decision-making by individual patient and caregiver about the risk and benefit of a drug therapy.

Methods: Randomized controlled trials of cholinesterase inhibitors (i.