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Delirium, a common syndrome in terminally ill people, presents specific challenges to a good death in end‐of‐life care. This paper examines the relational engagement between hospice nurses and their patients in a context of end‐of‐life delirium. Ethnographic fieldwork spanning 15 months was conducted at a freestanding residential hospice in eastern Canada. A shared value system was apparent within the nursing community of hospice; patients’ comfort and dignity were deemed most at stake and therefore commanded nurses’ primary attention. This overarching commitment to comfort and dignity shaped all of nursing practice in this hospice, including practices related to end‐of‐life delirium. The findings of this study elaborate the ways in which hospice nurses interpreted and responded to the discomfort of their patients in delirium, as well as the efforts they made to understand their patients’ subjective experiences and to connect with them in supportive ways. In addition to what is already known about clinical assessment and treatment of delirium in palliative care settings, the findings of this study offer points of reflection for nurses anywhere who are contending with the relational challenges that delirium presents in end‐of‐life care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debate surrounding the need for evidence-based research in all fields of otolaryngology has recently emerged. A review of English language articles dealing with the treatment of Menière's disease published from 1989 to 1999 was performed. The papers were classified according to article type (observational studies, non-clinical studies, controlled trials, randomised controlled trials) and according to the grade of evidence that was offered. A total of 128 publications were reviewed, of which only three were randomised controlled trials and a further three were well-designed controlled studies without randomization. The majority of papers were non-experimental clinical descriptive studies or case series. Data from this review would suggest that more comprehensive evidence-based studies are required in order to settle areas of confusion surrounding treatment of this relapsing condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cardiac disease is the number one killer of Canadian women, and therapies are often highly time dependent. Consequently, understanding the forms of knowledge that women draw upon to understand and interpret their symptoms of a potential cardiac event may be important in relation to efforts to reduce treatment-seeking delay. Data for this grounded-theory study were drawn from in-depth interviews with 16 women who went to one of two emergency departments between June 2005 and June 2006 for the treatment of symptoms indicating potential cardiac illness. The basic social process of maintaining integrity explained the women's interpretations of, and actions in relation to, their symptoms. This paper indicates the findings as they relate to specific forms of knowledge the women used to make decisions about treatment-seeking, including embodied, temporal, rational, and relational ways of knowing. Clinical Relevance: The results of this study contribute to the body of knowledge with regard to women's decisions about seeking treatment for the symptoms of potential cardiac illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poxvirus infections affecting the skin of cats are extremely rare in North America, in contrast to Europe where cowpox virus is well recognized as an accidental pathogen in cats that hunt small rodents. The virus or viruses responsible for the anecdotal cases in North America have never been characterized. This paper reports a case of raccoonpox infection in a Canadian cat. Biopsy of the initial ulcerative lesion on the forepaw revealed ballooning degeneration of surface and follicular keratinoctyes. Infected cells contained large eosinophilic type A inclusions. Electron microscopic examination revealed virions of an orthopoxvirus, subsequently identified as raccoonpox by polymerase chain reaction and gene sequencing. The cat made a full recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers some of the policy implications of issues raised during a conference about treatment decision-making in the clinical encounter held in Hamilton, Ontario in May 1999. Policies promoting patient participation in treatment decision-making need to be flexible enough to ensure that they are appropriate across the range of contexts in which health care decisions are made and acceptable to people with diverse preferences and abilities. They should also be formulated in consideration of other health policies and of available resources. Policies of informing people and involving them in decisions about their care are unlikely to be simple to implement. Various strategies might be needed to support them. These include the development of appropriate skills among health professionals and in the general population, the use of interventions to encourage people to play more active roles in decisions about their health care, the provision of decision aids for people facing specific decisions and the provision and accreditation of more general information resources and services. If information and other facilitators of patient participation in decision-making are seen as integral to good quality health care, then funding should be made available for them. This will, however, have opportunity costs. Policy makers’ decisions about how much health care funding should be invested in which strategies should be underpinned by good research evidence about the effects that different types of intervention have on a range of outcomes for individuals, health care systems and populations. The knowledge on which current policies are based is limited. The development of future policies will be enhanced if policy makers invest in critical conceptual thinking, reflective practice, imaginative development work and good quality evaluative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we discuss how we used institutional ethnography (Institutional ethnography as practice, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD and 2006) to map out powerful ruling relations that organize nurses' wound care work. In recent years, the growing number of people living with wounds that heal slowly or not at all has presented substantial challenges for those managing the demands on Canada's publicly insured health‐care system. In efforts to address this burden, Canadian health‐care administrators and policy‐makers rely on scientific evidence about how wounds heal and what treatments are most effective. Advanced wound care exemplifies the growing authorization of particular forms of evidence that change the ways in which nurses come to know about and conduct their work. The focus of this paper's nursing inquiry is a critique of registered nurses' wound work as it arises within the established uptake of scientific evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the "Sixth International Conference on Oral Biology" to be held at Toronto, Ontario, from June 3-5, 1974. The theme of the conference will be "Pharmacology and Therapeutics." Interested scientists are invited to submit specific titles and abstracts of papers to be considered for presentation at the conference. Primary consideration will be given to research utilizing a multidiscipline approach and having a wide appeal to scientists in oral biology. Titles should clearly define the topic; a single page abstract must include a summary of materials, research methodology, results and conclusions.