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This paper presents a simple, reliable, economical, safe, accurate and reproducible method for atmospheric aerosol lead determination in glass fiber filters, consisting on an acid digestion procedure and atomic absorption spectrometry quantification. The acid digestion is accelerated by the use of a microwave oven with capped Teflon PFA vessels, and a two steps power and time program, The mixture of 10 mL HNO3 and 1 mL HF was selected between many tries, for both economic and environmental reasons. The use of direct standards for quantification is proposed instead of added standards on filters, using background correction (deuterium lamp). The filter lead content quantification was carried out through blank analyses. Lead determinations were carried out then in 2629 samples of atmospheric aerosol at threesampling points in the city of Cartagena (Spain), from 1990 to 1994.We present the annual average of these values for each year and sampling location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The Alabama Child Parenting Questionnaire (APQ) is a multi-source and multi-method instrument created to assess the most relevant parenting practices from a bidirectional perspective. Despite its advantages, the APQ has not been validated with a Spanish population. The objective of this study was to analyse the psychometric properties and factor structure of the APQ, child self-report version, in a community sample of Spanish children., Method: The participants were 423 Spanish children (58.9% boys) aged between 8 and 12 years., Results: Exploratory factor analysis suggested a version of the questionnaire that consists of 16 items with a four-factor structure: Parental Involvement, Positive Parenting, Inconsistent Discipline, and Poor Supervision. The internal consistency of the subscales was moderate, except for the father's Parental Involvement factor, which reached acceptable reliability. Convergent validity with a measure of quality of life was adequate. Gender differences were only found in Poor Supervision, with higher scores in boys than in girls., Conclusions: Overall, these findings provide support for the use of the APQ to measure parenting practices perceived by Spanish children.

Objective: To determine and analyze drug prescription at hospital discharge, mainly regarding generic drug use, use of novel but irrelevant therapeutic agents and use of low therapeutic value drugs (LTVD)., Material and Methods: In a retrospective study 195 discharge reports from 11 different departments in a 450-bed general hospital were analyzed for a monthly period. An Access database allowed us to record the number of prescriptions, each drugs therapeutic group according to the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) Classification System, prescribed drugs for which generics are available, prescribed C-group drugs, LTVD drugs, etc., Results: Following an analysis of results, only 6.17% of all drugs were prescribed according to their generic name, when this would have been possible in 22.8%. If only the most efficient agents had been prescribed, savings would have amounted to 589.3 Euros. In all, 1.28% of prescribed drugs were LTVD, and 1.15% had irrelevant therapeutic value., Conclusion: Although specialized medical prescription represents a minimum of total prescriptions in a healthcare area, measures intended to improve quality will have a positive impact on primary care prescriptions. These measures include information to physicians on more efficient preparations, plus the design of a Pharmacotherapeutic Guide to unify pharmacologic criteria in the Area.

Up-to-date, evidence-based consensus protocols are an increasingly incorporated tool in health care. These protocols, clinical pathways, etc., represent a major support of health-care quality, namely scientific-technical quality. Compliance with these protocols by all team members guarantees that all patients be provided with an adequate level of health-care quality in the light of current knowledge and using available means. This principle of uniformity and quality in health care is essential for all, no matter the level of health care delivered or the activity being developed. In the Pharmacy Department and, more specifically, in the Unit of Cytostatic Agent Reconstitution and Dosing, knowledge and consensus on stability conditions and timing for diluted mixtures are essential to reach area-related quality standards. From literature references that are most relevant to or most widely used by in-hospital pharmacy departments, we designed a documented stabilities protocol to be used as a tool to: Augment preparation quality by including a documented expiry date within labels, optimize management on the basis of scientific criteria for mixtures not administered to patients and returned to the Pharmacy Department and design alternatives to hospitalization and outpatient delivery programs to improve end-user satisfaction and, therefore, health-care quality.

Orthotopic liver transplant (OLT) is nowadays an accepted procedure for the treatment of patients with end-stage liver disease. Because of the significant state of malnutrition of such patients, we decided to evaluate the nutritional condition of patients accepted by the hospital's Transplants Committee as candidates for this type of therapy, with the eventual aim of discovering the types of malnutrition in the different pathologies, and which were the most frequent. The sample studied showed a significant prevalence of malnutrition. Patients with viral hepatitis showed only visceral type malnutrition, which affected 100% of them. The ethanolic cirrhosis group presented all types of malnutrition-energy-calorific (35%), protein (24%) and visceral (53%), while the group of other liver diseases presented 15% of energy-calorific malnutrition and 85% visceral. From these results, we conclude that the sample studied has a high prevalence of malnutrition and that the importance of its detection makes it possible to reduce pre- and post-surgical morbidity and mortality rates with an appropriate nutritional support.