Publications by authors named "P M Dodek"

Background: Moral distress affects the well-being of health care professionals and can lead to burnout and attrition. Assessing moral distress and taking action based on this assessment are important. A new moral conflict assessment (MCA) designed to prompt action was developed and tested.

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Objectives: Refine the administrative data definition of sepsis in hospitalized patients, including less severe cases.

Design And Setting: For each of 1928 infection and 108 organ dysfunction codes used in Canadian hospital abstracts, experts reached consensus on the likelihood that it could relate to sepsis. We developed a new algorithm, called AlgorithmL, that requires at least one infection and one organ dysfunction code adjudicated as likely or very likely to be related to sepsis.

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Background: Bloodstream infections are associated with substantial morbidity and mortality. Early, appropriate antibiotic therapy is important, but the duration of treatment is uncertain.

Methods: In a multicenter, noninferiority trial, we randomly assigned hospitalized patients (including patients in the intensive care unit [ICU]) who had bloodstream infection to receive antibiotic treatment for 7 days or 14 days.

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Article Synopsis
  • The introduction of high-sensitivity troponin (hsTnT) testing for emergency department patients with cardiac chest pain resulted in a significant reduction in length of stay, decreasing from approximately 464 minutes to 285 minutes.
  • The study included over 5,500 patients with cardiac chest pain, revealing a very low rate of missed major adverse cardiac events (MACE) at just 0.2%, indicating the safety of the new testing method.
  • No changes were observed in admission rates for both cardiac (around 24%) and noncardiac chest pain patients, while noncardiac cases remained stable in length of stay as well, underscoring the specific impact of hsTnT testing on cardiac chest pain
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Background: High-cost users (HCU) represent important targets for health policy interventions. Sepsis is a life-threatening syndrome that is associated with high morbidity, mortality, and economic costs to the healthcare system. We sought to estimate the effect of sepsis on being a subsequent HCU.

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