Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to R Balogh.
Angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) is a component of the renin-angiotensin system and is critical in the homeostatic control of systemic blood pressure. There are two isozymes of ACE that result from two distinct promoter regions with the single ACE gene. In this article, we discuss the biochemistry of tissue specific promoter recognition as exemplified by the ACE gene.
The literature on audits of nursing care shows a strong link between the quality of nursing care and nursing labour force issues. Early attempts to develop a universally applicable formula to set nurse staffing levels on the basis of variations in patient dependency were shown to have been based on unrealistic assumptions about the ability of scientific methods to remove the influence of judgement from such areas of decision-making. The extent to which the validity of audit instruments has been established is reviewed, showing the number of studies to be small, almost exclusively in relation to American instruments, and with inconclusive results. An extension of the concept of validity is discussed, based on House's approach [House, E.R. (1980). Evaluating with Validity. Sage Publications, London, Beverly Hills] towards establishing validity in educational evaluation. This approach explicitly acknowledges the role of judgement in the evaluative enterprise, and widens the debate about how to settle questions of validity for audits of nursing care.
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Increasing interest in audit in the health service has focused attention on the tools and methods used to achieve it. These can be extremely expensive, so a tendency to opt for off-the-shelf packages has developed. This article reviews how one such instrument, The Central Nottinghamshire Psychiatric Nursing Audit, has been used in two settings over the past three years, with particular emphasis on its cost-effectiveness.
The views of nurse and midwife teachers occupy a crucial role in discussions about the quality of educational provision. So far, however, little information has been available on what the members of the profession think about this issue. In the course of a two-year research project commissioned by the ENB on performance indicators for training institutions, we asked teachers and their colleagues in all the English NHS regions to describe the characteristics of a high standard school. The study was conducted in the spring of 1988, that is, following the clinical grading review and the initiative to amalgamate school but before the NHS review and the acceptance of Project 2000. The data provided are an account of what is valued in schools of nursing and midwifery, for which a high degree of consensus was found among respondents. Management issues emerged as the top concern, followed by resources. Curriculum issues ranked third, closely followed by service links and professional/teacher issues. External links were of low importance.
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