No abstract available.
Fontan Procedure*

No abstract available.
Humans

No abstract available.
Humans ; Postoperative Care*

PURPOSE: This is a comparative study using secondary data from the Korean national long term care (LTC) insurance. METHODS: Visiting nursing (VN) service users (n=666) and non-users (n=4,375) were extracted and compared in terms of medical expenditures, length of hospitalization, and annual number of ambulatory care visits to investigate effects of VN services in LTC. RESULTS: Total health care expenditures were compared between the two groups and it was found that VN service users spent about $ 1700 than non-users for their medical costs between 2009 and 2011. The average length of in-hospital stay for VN service users was 19.4 days shorter than that of non-users. However, using VN services did not significantly influence the annual number of ambulatory care visits. CONCLUSION: The study has found that VN services are effective ways of providing community-based LTC services. We recommend LTC policy makers to further utilize VN services to deliver cost effective health care services.
Administrative Personnel ; Ambulatory Care ; Delivery of Health Care* ; Health Care Costs ; Health Expenditures ; Hospitalization ; Humans ; Inpatients ; Insurance ; Insurance, Long-Term Care* ; Long-Term Care* ; Nursing Services* ; Nursing* ; Outpatients

No abstract available.
Syncope*

PURPOSE: This study was done to identify the relationships of perception of JCI (Joint Commission International) hospital accreditation, nursing performance, self-concept and retention intention in nurses. METHODS: Self-administered questionnaires were used to collect data from 199 JCI-accredited nurses in general hospitals located in Gyeonggi Province. Data collection was done in May 2015 and analyzed using t-test, ANOVA, Scheffé's test, and Pearson correlation coefficients. RESULTS: The scores for perception, and nursing performance were (on a five-point Likert scale) 3.34, 3.78 respectively, and self-concept and retention intention were (on a eight-point Likert scale) 5.40 and 5.21 respectively. Nurses' perception, nursing performance, self-concept, and retention intention showed significant differences depending on age, marital status, education, department, work experience, position, Korean accreditation, and JCI accreditation. A positive correlation was observed between perception, nursing performance, self-concept, and retention intention. CONCLUSION: The results of this study indicate that enhancing positive perception and good nursing performance can produce good self-concept and retention intention.
Accreditation* ; Data Collection ; Education ; Gyeonggi-do ; Hospitals, General ; Intention* ; Joints* ; Marital Status ; Nursing*

No abstract available.
Pulmonary Valve* ; Tetralogy of Fallot*

Background: As prevention of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) transmission in healthcare settings has become a critical component in its effective management, COVID-19 specific infection prevention and control (IPC) guidelines were developed and implemented by numerous countries. Although largely based on the current evidence-base, guidelines show much heterogeneity, as they are influenced by respective health system capacities, epidemiological risk, and socioeconomic status. This study aims to analyze the variations and concurrences of these guidelines to draw policy implications for COVID-19 response and future guidelines development. Methods: The contents of the COVID-19 IPC guidelines were analyzed using the categories and codes developed based on “World Health Organization guidelines on core components.” Data analysis involved reviewing, appraising and synthesizing data from guidelines, which were then arranged into categories and codes. Selection of countries was based on the country income level, availability of COVID-19 specific IPC guideline developed at a national or district level. Results: The guidelines particularly agreed on IPC measures regarding application of standard precautions and providing information to patients and visitors, monitoring and audit of IPC activities and staff illnesses, and management of built environment/equipments.The guidelines showed considerable differences in certain components, such as workplace safety measures and criteria for discontinuation of precautions. Several guidelines also contained unique features which enabled a more systematic response to COVID-19. Conclusion The guidelines generally complied with the current evidence-based COVID-19 management but also revealed variances stemming from differences in local health system capacity. Several unique features should be considered for benchmark in future guidelines development.

OBJECTIVES: In this paper, we present an automatic method to segment four chambers by extracting a whole heart, separating the left and right sides of the heart, and spliting the atrium and ventricle regions from each heart in cardiac computed tomography angiography (CTA) efficiently. METHODS: We smooth the images by applying filters to remove noise. Next, the volume of interest is detected by using k-means clustering. In this step, the whole heart is coarsely extracted, and it is used for seed volumes in the next step. Then, we detect seed volumes using a geometric analysis based on anatomical information and separate the left and right heart regions with the power watershed algorithm. Finally, we refine the left and right sides of the heart using the level-set method, and extract the atrium and ventricle from the left and right heart regions using the split energy function. RESULTS: We tested the proposed heart segmentation method using 20 clinical scan datasets which were acquired from various patients. To validate the proposed heart segmentation method, we evaluated its accuracy in segmenting four chambers based on four error evaluation metrics. The average values of differences between the manual and automatic segmentations were less than 3.3%, approximately. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed method extracts the four chambers of the heart accurately, demonstrating that this approach can assist the cardiologist.
Angiography ; Dataset ; Heart ; Humans ; Methods* ; Noise