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Biomedical subjects

W M Barron

Publications and source records attributed to W M Barron.

41 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
PubMed1984

The pregnant surgical patient: medical evaluation and management.

Nonobstetric disease requiring surgery may complicate pregnancy and jeopardize maternal and fetal well-being. Surgery may be safely done if the physician is aware of anatomic and physiologic alterations during gestation that necessitate an altered approach to diagnosis and management. Fetal exposure to all diagnostic and therapeutic agents should be minimized, particularly during organogenesis. However, the risk to the fetus of diagnostic irradiation is justifiable when information essential to maternal health is likely to be obtained. Furthermore, the broad range of available antibiotic, analgesic, and anesthetic agents provide the physician with options for treatment that have an acceptable degree of risk to fetal health. Anesthesia and surgery are tolerated considerably better by the fetus than is maternal hypotension, hypoxia, or sepsis. When an operative procedure is urgently or emergently indicated, pregnancy should not delay timely intervention.

Abnormalities, Drug-Induced↗
PubMed1980

Failed appointments. Who misses them, why they are missed, and what can be done.

Failure to keep appointments is disruptive to the health care delivery system in several ways. Rates of missed appointments in a variety of practice settings demonstrate a significant problem. The patient most likely to fail to keep a given appointment is one who is young, comes from a low socioeconomic group, has a large, unstable family, and has previously broken appointments. In addition, this patient will most likely have no significant ongoing relationship with a single physician, may have been referred from an emergency room, will have been scheduled for his or her appointment at a distant time, may well have forgotten about the appointment or thought it was scheduled for another time, and will feel little sense of urgency about keeping the appointment. Several effective methods to reduce appointment-breaking behavior are discussed. Mailed appointment reminders are both effective and cost-efficient. Improved communication between patient and physician combined with personal interest and attention an produce a positive effect on the appointment-keeping behavior of a patient. Finally, the pragmatic details of appointment scheduling can be altered to reduce the disruptive effect of the missed appointment by such methods as predictive overbooking based on individual patient characteristics, use of the modified wave scheduling technique, and elimination of the automatic reappointing of patients who have previously broken appointments.

Adult↗