Management of community-acquired pneumonia by trained family general practitioners.

Setting: Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is a respiratory health disease with a high prevalence in the general population. Family general practitioners (GPs) can play an important role in CAP management by reducing unnecessary hospital admissions and, consequently, national health costs.

Objective: To assess CAP management by trained GPs.

Quality of generated diagnosis related groups in Italian Respiratory Intermediate Care Units.

Background: To date we lack official data on tipology of Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) and their quality in Italian Respiratory Intermediate Care Units (RICUs).

Aim: The objective of the study was to collect data on the activity of 26 Italian RICUs and to evaluate the quality of the DRGs generated.

Methods: The primary and secondary diseases, the procedures carried out and their coding using the ICD9 system (valid Italy until 2000) were collected from the discharge forms of patients admitted to RICUs.

[Clinical policy for management and risk stratification of community-acquired pneumonia in patients hospitalized on the basis of conventional admission criteria].

To identify discrepancies between Pneumonia Severity Index (PSI) risk class and the conventional criteria for deciding the site of care we performed a prospective observational study on 229 patients hospitalized for community-acquired pneumonia. PSI classes and corresponding mortality rates were as following: class I, 41 patients (0%); class II, 20 (0%); class III, 58 (1.7%); class IV, 86 (8.

[Assessment of anxiety levels in patients during diagnostic endoscopy].

Patients with increased pre-endoscopic anxiety take advantage of the use of conscious sedation. However, the habit of using premedication varies according to the type of endoscopic examination. Aims of this study were: to evaluate whether different endoscopic procedures may have different effects on patient anxiety; and whether anxiety affects patient tolerance.

[Community-acquired pneumonia: outcomes and costs].

The number of patients admitted with community acquired pneumonias (CAP) varies greatly from one hospital to another. Prognostic models for CAP can help physicians decide which cases to treat on an outpatients basis. Our aims were: a) to validate a model for predicting low-risk CAP, and b) to estimate savings that would have resulted if the low-risk patients identified by the model had been treated at home rather than in hospital.