Systematic review of the factors and the key indicators that identify doctors at risk of complaints, malpractice claims or impaired performance.

Objective: To identify the risk factors associated with complaints, malpractice claims and impaired performance in medical practitioners.

Design: Systematic review.

Data Sources: Ovid-Medline, Ovid Embase, Scopus and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials were searched from 2011 until March 2020.

Between the flags: implementing a safety-net system at scale to recognise and manage deteriorating patients in the New South Wales Public Health System.

Quality Problem: In 2005, the Clinical Excellence Commission (CEC) found that unrecognised patient deterioration remained an important problem in New South Wales (NSW) public hospitals.

Initial Assessment: The challenge was to design and implement an effective and sustainable safety-net system in all 225 NSW public hospitals.

Designing A Solution: The CEC's system was designed in collaboration with a broad coalition of partners, including clinicians, managers, system administrators and collaborating agencies.

Search performance with discrete-cell stimulus arrays: filtered naturalistic images and probabilistic markers.

In order to partially fill the gap between search studies with artificial and naturalistic stimuli, experiments with segmented and spatially filtered images of real stimuli in the discrete cells of search arrays were conducted. RT × set size functions obtained with the spatially filtered arrays were compared with those obtained with geometric and other types of arrays. With the aid of Fourier analysis, components of target certainty/uncertainty, target-distractor similarity/dissimilarity, and distractor homogeneity/heterogeneity were evaluated for their effects on search performance and efficiency.

Aseptic insertion of central venous lines to reduce bacteraemia.

Objective: To reduce the rate of central line-associated bacteraemia (CLAB).

Design: A collaborative quality improvement project in intensive care units (ICUs) to promote aseptic insertion of central venous lines (CVLs). A checklist was used to record compliance with all aspects of aseptic CVL insertion, with maximal sterile barrier precautions for clinicians ("clinician bundle") and patients ("patient bundle").

A statewide approach to systematising hand hygiene behaviour in hospitals: clean hands save lives, part I.

Objective: To describe the planning and execution of a statewide campaign aimed at improving compliance with hand hygiene practices in New South Wales public hospitals.

Design And Setting: The campaign was conducted in all area health services (AHSs) in NSW (covering 208 public hospitals) between February 2006 and February 2007. Clinical practice improvement methods and campaign strategies were used to improve the availability and use of alcohol-based hand rub (AHR) at the point of patient care, using staff champions and local leaders, engaging patients and families, and measuring compliance.

More than hand hygiene is needed to affect methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus clinical indicator rates: clean hands save lives, part IV.

Objective: To examine whether improved hand hygiene compliance in health care workers after a statewide hand hygiene campaign in New South Wales hospitals was associated with a fall in rates of infection with multiresistant organisms.

Design And Setting: Data on rates of new methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections (expressed as four clinical indicators) are reported by some Australian hospitals to the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards (ACHS) for accreditation purposes and are mandatorily reported by all NSW hospitals to the NSW Department of Health. Infections are classified according to whether they are acquired in the intensive care unit (ICU) or other wards and whether they are from sterile sites (blood cultures) or non-sterile sites.

Improvements in hand hygiene across New South Wales public hospitals: clean hands save lives, part III.

Objective: To describe improvements in hand hygiene compliance after a statewide hand hygiene campaign conducted in New South Wales public hospitals.

Design And Setting: The campaign was conducted in all area health services in NSW (covering all 208 public hospitals). Alcohol-based hand rub (AHR) was introduced into all hospitals between March and June 2006.

Culture change for hand hygiene: clean hands save lives, part II.

Objective: To present the results of surveys of staff, patients and visitors about their perceptions of hand hygiene behaviour before and after implementation of the Clean hands save lives campaign in New South Wales public hospitals.

Design And Setting: Pre- and post-campaign questionnaires, disseminated through project officers in each health authority, were completed by selected staff and patients/visitors in all 208 public hospitals in NSW. Combined, de-identified results for each health authority were forwarded to the NSW Clinical Excellence Commission for analysis.

Direction-specific changes of sensitivity after brief apparent motion stimuli.

Direction-specific losses in sensitivity were found for a test grating which was superimposed on a stationary contrast pedestal and which moved either in the same or opposite direction as a prior biasing stimulus. Three types of biasing stimuli were employed: a grating swept through 270 degrees in 45 degrees steps, a single 90 degrees step of a grating, and a single 90 degrees step of a grating which contained a blank IFI and whose perceived direction was reversed. For the biasing sweep and the single 90 degrees step, the response of directionally selective mechanisms (directional motion energy) is greatest for the direction which corresponds to the actual physical displacement of the stimulus.

Direction biasing by brief apparent motion stimuli.

The perceived direction of a motion step (probe stimulus) can be influenced by an earlier motion step or a brief motion sweep containing a series of steps (biasing stimulus). Depending upon experimental conditions, the biasing of the direction of the probe step (a phase shift of 180 degrees +/-Phi) by a biasing stimulus which precedes it by approximately 250 ms can either increase (positive filter biasing) or decrease (negative filter biasing) the tendency to see the probe move in the biasing direction as computed with a motion filter with a biphasic temporal impulse response. In a series of experiments it was found that biasing motions traversing 90 degrees of phase angle in fewer than six steps in less than 100 ms produced positive filter biasing.

Viewer-centered temporal biasing of 3-D rotation percepts.

The perceived direction of rotation of a 3-D cloud of dots can be biased by a prior rotation (Jiang, Pantle, and Mark, 1998 Perception & Psychophysics 60 275-286). In a series of experiments, it is shown that the temporal rotation bias is reversed by a 180 degrees change of head orientation between two rotation sequences; i.e.

Visual inertia of rotating 3-D objects.

Five experiments were designed to determine whether a rotating, transparent 3-D cloud of dots (simulated sphere) could influence the perceived direction of rotation of a subsequent sphere. Experiment 1 established conditions under which the direction of rotation of a virtual sphere was perceived unambiguously. When a near-far luminance difference and perspective depth cues were present, observers consistently saw the sphere rotate in the intended direction.

Probing visual motion signals with a priming paradigm.

The perceived motion of a vertical sine-wave luminance grating which undergoes an abrupt 180 deg phase shift (motion step) is ambiguous. The grating sometimes appears to move rightward; sometimes leftward. However, when the 180 deg step follows closely upon an unambiguous grating step, the 180 deg step appears to be in the same direction as the unambiguous step.

An energy model of interframe interval effects in single-step apparent motion.

A computational model was developed to explain the effects of an interframe interval (IFI) in single-step apparent motion experiments. In these experiments a stimulus appears in one position, disappears, and then reappears in a shifted position after a short or long IFI. If the luminance during the IFI matches the mean luminance of the stimulus frames, long IFIs result in perceived motion opposite the short-IFI conditions.

Detection and direction discrimination performance with flicker gratings in peripheral vision.

Detection and direction discrimination experiments were conducted with luminance and flicker gratings. The flicker gratings had bars made up of static random pixels interspersed between other bars with flickering random pixels. All experiments were carried out in peripheral vision with grating images centered at 8 deg eccentricity in the superior retina.

Visual resolution of motion ambiguity with periodic luminance- and contrast-domain stimuli.

Visual motion processes were studied with luminance- and contrast-modulated gratings. A sine-wave luminance grating was displaced abruptly back and forth by 3/16 cycle. The display sequence is ambiguous in that each 3/16-cycle phase shift (short-path motion) could just as readily be seen as a 13/16-cycle shift (long-path motion) in the opposite direction.

Immobility of some second-order stimuli in human peripheral vision.

Real-world objects and events are often demarcated and defined by changes of luminance. Such stimuli are easily noticed by human beings whether the stimuli occur in central or in peripheral vision. It is also possible to use differences of color, texture, contrast, or temporal characteristics to create visual stimuli (so-called non-luminance-domain or second-order stimuli).

On the mechanism that encodes the movement of contrast variations: velocity discrimination.

Motion can be perceived when a moving pattern is defined by variations in luminance. Motion can also be perceived when a moving pattern is defined by variations in contrast. The central focus of the present study was the isolation and description of the mechanism that is responsible for the processing of the movement of contrast variations.

Discontinuity limits for the generation of visual motion aftereffects with sine- and square-wave gratings.

Visual motion aftereffects (MAE's) were produced with adapting gratings that underwent repeated, abrupt displacements in a uniform direction. MAE's could be generated with sine-wave gratings even when the magnitude of each displacement approached a phase angle as large as 1/2 cycle. The maximum spatial step for generating a MAE with a square-wave grating was less than 1/4 cycle.

Using low-level filters to encode spatial displacements of visual stimuli.

Directional responses to visual stimuli were analysed with the aid of a minimal computational model. The model is based upon arrays of motion sensors whose receptive fields are modified versions of those (difference-of-Gaussians) used to describe mechanisms in popular spatial vision models. In the model antagonistic influences on each motion sensor were assumed to: (1) arise from spatially non-aligned areas of the retina; and (2) to follow different time courses.

Temporal determinants of spatial sine-wave masking.

A temporal forced-choice procedure was used to measure the contrast threshold for a sinusoidal test grating (spatial frequency - f) superimposed upon a sinusoidal background or masking grating (spatial frequency = 3f). The spatial contrast of the background grating was varied, and threshold measurements were made at each of a number of background contrasts to describe a threshold versus masking contrast (tvc) function. Tvc functions were obtained when the background and test grating contrasts were, independently of each other, held steady (0 Hz) or modulated at 5 Hz.

Apparent movement of successively generated subjective figures.

In the present studies a pair of random-dot frames was constructed so that two areas in the first frame (f1) were correlated with two areas in the second frame (f2). The alternation of the pair of frames (an f1--f2 sequence) gave rise to two subjective figures. When two pairs of randomdot frames (an f1--f2 sequence and an f3--f4 sequence), each of which produced two subjective figures in different locations, were thmeselves alternated, the subjective figures from the f1--f2 sequence interacted with the subjective figures from the f3--f4 sequence to produce apparent movement.