Evaluation of North Sea saturation procedures through divers monitoring.

Background: Saturation diving is a standard method of intervention for commercial diving during offshore operations. Current saturation procedures achieve a high level of safety with regards to decompression sickness but still put the divers under multiple stressors: 1) Environmental stress (long confinement, heat/cold, dense gases, high oxygen levels), 2) Work stress (muscular fatigue, psychological pressure, breathing equipment, etc.), 3) venous gas emboli associated with decompression, 4) Inflammation related to oxidative stress and microparticles.

Hindsight bias critically impacts on clinicians' assessment of care quality in retrospective case note review.

To determine whether hindsight bias impacts on retrospective case note review using a five point scoring system based on modern clinical governance toolkits. Survey. Clinicians of varying grades invited to complete a short internet survey.

An experimental model to measure the ability of headphones with active noise control to reduce patient's exposure to noise in an intensive care unit.

Background: Defining the association between excessive noise in intensive care units, sleep disturbance and morbidity, including delirium, is confounded by the difficulty of implementing successful strategies to reduce patient's exposure to noise. Active noise control devices may prove to be useful adjuncts but there is currently little to quantify their ability to reduce noise in this complex environment.

Methods: Sound meters were embedded in the auditory meatus of three polystyrene model heads with no headphones (control), with headphones alone and with headphones using active noise control and placed in patient bays in a cardiac ICU.