PubMed · 15523050
The source did not provide an abstract. Follow the original record for more information.
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Laura Eggertson. 2004-11-02. C. difficile: by the numbers.. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.1041694
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.
KEEP EXPLORING
BACKGROUND: Health systems worldwide face persistent health workers challenges including nursing shortages, workforce strain, and inequities. In Canada, these challenges have prompted renewed national and provincial reforms to strengthen recruitment, retention, leadership, and sustainability. This paper compares nursing workforce policy directions across Canada, and international jurisdictions to inform policy and planning. METHODS: A cross-country comparative analysis of policies building on a comprehensive national funded review that included an umbrella review of 69 systematic reviews, a comparative policy review of nursing workforce strategies in five jurisdictions, and validation through national horizon-scanning and policy dialogues (n >100). Evidence was analyzed across system, organizational, and individual levels. RESULTS: At the system level, international jurisdictions demonstrate comprehensive, legislated approaches integrating data, governance, and multi-year funding have advanced key nursing strategies. In Canada, the advances show the importance of strategies to have national and provincial/territorial alignment emphasizing leadership, flexibility, and inclusion as key levers. Organizational and individual-level reforms such as mentorship, leadership development, and wellness initiatives are expanding but remain variably evaluated. Experts identified national workforce data strategies and policy integration with embedded evaluation as key enablers to inform scalability and sustainability of implemented strategies. CONCLUSIONS: Canada's nursing workforce reforms are advancing toward coordinated, equity-driven, and evidence-informed strategies. Continued investment in evaluation, leadership, and national integrated data systems along with integrating nursing workforce planning within broader intersectoral planning will consolidate these gains and position Canada as an international leader in sustainable nursing workforce policy.
BACKGROUND: Despite the substantial amount of epilepsy-related information available on the Internet, little is known about its quality. Epilepsy-related information in English on the Canadian Internet was reviewed. METHODS: Popular search engines (google.ca, yahoo.ca, ca.altavista.com, simpatico.msn.ca) were interrogated. Web sites aimed primarily at patient and family education, geared toward human epilepsy, and epilepsy in general as opposed to one specific type or aspect of epilepsy, were included. Web sites were then subdivided in to proprietary (directly sponsored by the industry) and nonproprietary, and evaluated according to compliance with the principles of the Health on the Net (HON) Foundation Code of Conduct. Web sites without comprehensive contents were excluded. Comparison between total scores was done using the rank test. Categorized descriptors were assessed with t tests. RESULTS: Five proprietary and fourteen nonproprietary websites were identified. None of them were compliant with all eight principles of the HON code. The average number of principles with which these sites were in compliance was 3.3 (range: 1-6.5, P = 0.4, proprietary vs nonproprietary). CONCLUSIONS: The Internet has the potential to be a very powerful educational tool for patients with epilepsy. However, most of the easily accessed epilepsy web sites do not comply with accepted standards for health web sites.
Often in biomedical studies, the event of interest is recurrent and within-subject events cannot usually be assumed independent. In semi-parametric estimation of the proportional rates model, a working independence assumption leads to an estimating equation for the regression parameter vector, with within-subject correlation accounted for through a robust (sandwich) variance estimator; these methods have been extended to the case of clustered subjects. We consider variance estimation in the setting where subjects are clustered and the study consists of a small number of moderate-to-large-sized clusters. We demonstrate through simulation that the robust estimator is quite inaccurate in this setting. We propose a corrected version of the robust variance estimator, as well as jackknife and bootstrap estimators. Simulation studies reveal that the corrected variance is considerably more accurate than the robust estimator, and slightly more accurate than the jackknife and bootstrap variance. The proposed methods are used to compare hospitalization rates between Canada and the U.S. in a multi-centre dialysis study.