Accuracy of Spinal Anesthesia Drug Concentrations in Mixtures Prepared by Anesthetists.

Objective: Medication errors include the indirect dosing of drugs. For spinal anesthesia mixtures of local anesthetics, opioids are drawn from ampoules and combined in a syringe, according to clinical practice. We set out to determine the accuracy of the drug mixtures.

A RCT evaluating a pragmatic in-hospital service to increase the quality of discharge prescriptions.

Objective: To improve discharge prescription quality and information transfer to improve post-hospital care with a pragmatic in-hospital service.

Design: A single-centre, randomized controlled trial.

Setting: Internal medicine wards in a Swiss teaching hospital.

A web-based restriction endonuclease tool for mycobacteriophage cluster prediction.

A recent explosion in the amount of genomic data has revealed a large genetic diversity in the bacteriophages that infect Mycobacterium smegmatis. In an effort to assess the novelty of newly described mycobacteriophage isolates and provide a preliminary determination of their probable cluster assignment prior to full genome sequencing, we have developed a systematic approach that relies on restriction endonuclease analysis. We demonstrate that a web-based tool, the Phage Enzyme Tool (or PET), is capable of rapidly facilitating this analysis and exhibits reliability in the putative placement of mycobacteriophages into specific clusters of previously sequenced phages.

An intraoperative pre-incision single dose of intravenous ketamine does not have an effect on postoperative analgesic requirements under clinical conditions.

Evidence about the effectiveness of the N-methyl-D-aspartate antagonist ketamine to reduce postoperative acute and long-lasting pain is inconclusive. The aim of this study was to investigate effects of adding an intraoperative, pre-incision single intravenous dose of ketamine to a routine anaesthesia regimen on postoperative analgesic requirements, side-effects and persisting pain up to three months. After obtaining Ethical Committee approval and written informed patient consent, 120 patients were included in this prospective, randomised, double-blinded, placebo-controlled study.

Rural telemedicine: satellites and fiber optics.

Rural America Telemedicine requires very high bandwidth to provide timely transmission of large data sets. These resources may take decades to appear because of the economics of low population densities and costly installation, and the historically low rate of bandwidth improvement available from the common communication providers. Satellites provide the natural choice for communication between the rural primary care centers and the tertiary care hospital.