David A Harrison

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..This paper describes the case mix, outcome and activity for admissions to intensive care units (ICUs) with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP)...

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..These aspects of study design impact upon the evaluation of complex interventions in critical care. Clinicians should also consider these specific issues when implementing new complex interventions into their practice...

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..The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effect of visits from critical care outreach services (CCOS) before admission to and following discharge from critical care...

..To describe the background to, rationale for, and structure and performance of the Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre risk prediction model...

..We describe the case mix, outcome, and activity of admissions with SAP who were identified from a high-quality clinical database...

..Some scores cannot be applied until several days into hospital admission. We thus sought to develop a new and more sensitive outcome prediction score--the Pancreatitis Outcome Prediction (POP) Score--for these high-risk patients...

..We interrogated a high quality clinical database to examine trends in the incidence and mortality of severe sepsis over a nine-year period...

..Periodic reassessment is beneficial to ensure calibration is maintained...

..We undertook a multicentre interrupted time-series analysis of the impact of CCOS, as characterised by the case mix, outcome and activity of admissions to adult, general critical care units in England...

..K. intensive care units and to generate hypotheses to guide future research by examining subsets of patients included in the PAC-Man Study...

..Non-survivors have a short length of ICU and hospital stay. APACHE II and III have poorer calibration and discrimination than SAPS II, MPM II and the ICNARC model in traumatic brain injury; however, no model had perfect calibration...

..To investigate whether mortality in UK intensive care units is higher in winter than in non-winter and to explore the importance of variations in case mix and increased pressure on ICUs...

..The paper also describes the case mix, outcome and activity of the admissions in the Case Mix Programme Database (CMPD)...

..To develop a new model to improve risk prediction for admissions to adult critical care units in the UK...

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..It is important to be aware if an association exists because risk prediction models do not adjust for deprivation...

..1% absolute reduction in 28-day mortality. Drotrecogin alfa (activated; DrotAA) was subsequently approved for use in patients with severe sepsis...

..There is little evidence on whether DrotAA is cost-effective in routine clinical practice. We assessed whether DrotAA is cost-effective in routine practice for adult patients with severe sepsis and multiple organ systems failing...

..The aim of the present study was to estimate the size of the high-risk general surgical population and to describe the outcome and intensive care unit (ICU) resource use...

..We studied the outcome of children transferred from local hospitals to PICUs...

..Efficacy studies are needed to ascertain whether management protocols involving PAC use can result in improved outcomes in specific groups if these devices are not to become a redundant technology...

..The greatest determinant of poor hospital survival in asthma patients was receipt of CPR within 24 hours before admission to ICU. Clinical management of these patients should be directed at preventing cardiac arrest before admission...

..This depends on the severity of the acute deterioration and the patient's functional reserve. There are currently no validated disease-specific scores that measure the severity of the acute exacerbation...

..However, there was considerable variation by unit, even after accounting for patient factors and differences in size and type of ICU, suggesting improved guidelines may be useful to facilitate uniform decision making...

..Yet, little is known regarding international variation in critical care services. We sought to understand differences in critical care delivery by comparing data on the distribution of services in eight countries...

..The article concludes with a step-wise approach to conducting studies of critical care based on administrative data...