Community care of patients receiving antipsychotic medication by depot injection.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to A Heavey.
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The Musgrave Pressure Plate System for the measurement of foot contact patterns comprises two fixed pressure plates constructed from arrays of load cells, interfaced to a BBC computer. Its main advantage is the ability to measure and analyse spatial distributions of contact pressures and their time dynamics, and to do this relatively inexpensively in a clinical setting. Its main potential disadvantage is that it can disrupt the natural gait pattern by the discipline in enforces on the foot placement. The eventual aim of the project of which this study forms the pilot phase, is to develop formal decision rules based on the analysis of a large number of normal subjects for the diagnosis of abnormal foot pathology and the evaluation of therapy, using data collected by a Musgrave system. The objective of this study is to set baseline norms, and to evaluate the system. The analysis is based on 100 normal subjects using selected parameters on foot contact pressure, contact area and time, available from the system. Several stages of the foot contact process are described in terms of the selected parameters. The results show clearly that even with a relatively small subset of the available recorded data on each foot plant, a wide range of descriptive information can be accumulated. Statistically significant differences were found between the right and left feet on most of the parameters considered. However, these differences were based on a large sample and are not large in absolute terms in many instances. Therefore the observed differences may be small compared to differences between normal and abnormal cases.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
This paper gives an overview of the issues involved when doctors and patients communicate and some of the training approaches developed by medical educators. Doctors are under pressure to improve their relationships with patients. Effective training in communication skills exists but is only erratically implemented in medical schools. What is required above all is recognition of its central importance in medical education at all levels.