Assessment Tool

Rigorous scientific and well-designed clinical trials to evaluate the effect of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is lacking. We, therefore, designed this study to evaluate the effectiveness of a commonly used TCM preparation in treating acute cough of uncomplicated URTI in adults and to search for a safe, effective and affordable alternative treatment for this common condition. A randomised, double-blinded, placebo-control study comparing this TCM preparation with a placebo was conducted in 82 patients who attended the Family Medicine Training Centre, Prince of Wales Hospital, Hong Kong between November and December, 2003. The TCM herbal preparation includes nine commonly used TCM herbs for cough such as chuanbei, fangfeng, jiegeng, gancao and baibu (see Table 1). The treatment lasted for 5 days and patients were followed-up for another 6 days. Patients were asked to fill in a cough score and validated Leicester cough questionnaire (LCQ). 62 patients (75.6%) had completed the tria...

BackgroundArthropathy is one of the earliest and most common manifestations of hereditary haemochromatosis with a significant impact on quality of life. Although its radiographic features are well known, there is no assessment tool for their evaluation.ObjectiveTo develop and validate a novel scoring system for the evaluation of radiographic features of haemochromatosis arthropathy.MethodsA dichotomous scoring system assessing four radiographic features of haemochromatosis arthropathy and a 4-grade scale reflecting severity of radiographic change have been developed. Standard radiographs (hand, wrist, knee and ankle) of 170 subjects (116 male, 54 female) with genetically confirmed haemochromatosis and laboratory signs of iron overload were assessed by three readers and construct validity, feasibility and cross-sectional reliability (intrareader and inter-reader) were assessed.ResultsIntrareader and inter-reader reliability as assessed by percentage pairwise agreement and Cohen's...

In this article, we investigate whether (1) the IINFVo (Impression, Intelligibility, Noise, Fluency and Voicing) perceptual rating scale and (2) the AMPEX (Auditory Model Based Pitch Extractor) acoustical analysis are suitable for evaluating adductor spasmodic dysphonia (AdSD). Voice recordings of 12 patients were analysed. The inter-rater and intra-rater consistency showed highly significant correlations for the IINFVo rating scale, with the exception of the parameter Noise. AMPEX reliably analyses vowels (correlation between PUVF (percentage of frames with unreliable F0/voicing 0.748), running speech (correlation between PVF (percentage of voiced frames)/voicing 0.699) and syllables. Correlations between IINFVo and AMPEX range from 0.608 to 0.818, except for noise. This study indicates that IINFVo and AMPEX could be robust and complementary assessment tools for the evaluation of AdSD. Both the tools provide us with the valuable information about voice quality, stability of F0 (fundamental frequency) and specific dimensions controlling the transitions between voiced and unvoiced segments.

ClimateQUAL™ is the latest assessment tool in the assessment toolkit development by ARL and accessible through the StatsQUAL® gateway to li- brary assessment tools. The tools available through StatsQUAL® are combining the power of both quan- titative and qualitative methods and are integrated into a platform that allows easy data collection, analy- sis and presentation of the results. The goal

The study of human behaviour ultimately requires the documentation of human movement. In some instances movements can be recorded through a simple button press on a computer input device. In other situations responses can be captured through questionnaire surveys. Nevertheless, there is a need within many neuroscience settings to capture how complex movements unfold over time (human kinematics). Current methods of measuring human kinematics range from accurate but multifarious laboratory configurations to ...

In 1997 the Dearing Report made recommendations for the introduction of personal Development Planning (PDP) into Higher Education. The report called for Higher Education Institutions to introduce 'progress files' which should consist of a transcript to record student achievement and a method where students could "…monitor, build and reflect upon the personal development." There have been a variety of responses

Nine chronic stroke subjects trained over a period of 6 weeks, with 3 one-hour sessions of robot-assisted therapy per week, consisting in two exercises requiring active participation pro-moted by therapeutic games. Behavioral data collected by the Haptic Knob were ...

The objective of the present work is to analyze the role of landscape for environmental security in the Yantra River Basin, exploring its relationships with river-water quality and flood hazard. The relationship between landscape and river-water quality is analyzed on the basis of landscape indicators and assessment tools like Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment (AGWA) and Analytical Tools Interface for Landscape Assessment (ATtILA). The relationship between landscape and flood hazard is explored using set of floodhazard indicators and the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). The results from ATtILA implementation show that the main sources of nitrogen loading are the agricultural landscapes and the urban areas in the river basin. The SWAT simulation is done for three scenarios in which land cover (forest lands) changes are related to flood hazard. For the most unfavorable scenario, decreasing forest lands, a significant increase of the river discharge is predicted. The degr...

This paper presents CESM, a tool that could easily be integrated within any quality department's toolkit. It also briefly discusses the external measurement philosophy, the techniques used for the perceived software quality assessment and the overall software measurement methodology. Although the paper presents in relative detail the CESM tool, emphasis has been placed on presenting how this tool has been

The Performance Indicators for Coding Quality (PICQ) is a data quality assessment tool developed by Australia's National Centre for Classification in Health (NCCH). PICQ consists of a number of indicators covering all ICD-10-AM disease chapters, some procedure chapters from the Australian Classification of Health Intervention (ACHI) and some Australian Coding Standards (ACS). The indicators can be used to assess the coding quality of hospital morbidity data by monitoring compliance of coding conventions and ACS; this enables the identification of particular records that may be incorrectly coded, thus providing a measure of data quality. There are 31 obstetric indicators available for the ICD-10-AM Fourth Edition. Twenty of these 31 indicators were classified as Fatal, nine as Warning and two Relative. These indicators were used to examine coding quality of obstetric records in the 2004-2005 financial year Australian national hospital morbidity dataset. Records with obstetric dis...

This study aimed to develop and test a framework and tool for assessing and developing community participation in Primary Health Organisations (PHOs) in New Zealand. A qualitative study completed in three phases: semi-structured interviews with 42 key stakeholders in the primary care sector; development of and consultation on a draft toolkit, which included a PHO review process; and piloting the toolkit in four different types of PHOs. A toolkit entitled Community Participation: A Resource Kit and Self-Assessment Tool for PHOs (CP Toolkit for PHOs) was developed, which contains a set of resources for organisational self-review and a framework for community participation under the six headings: Organisational Structure, Maori Responsiveness, Governance and Management Processes, Use of Resources, Links to the Wider Community, and Consultation and Decision-Making. The pilot PHO sites found the CP Toolkit, and the review process contained within it, to be very relevant to the implementa...