METHODS: Fifty-eight diabetic patients with ulcers at Wagner Grade 2 and above involved in this study after presented at two study centres of tertiary teaching hospitals. The assigned patients received conventional wound care with additional HBOT given at 2.4 ATA for 90 minutes. Patients in the control group who received conventional wound care only were treated and observed for 30 days. The progress of wound healing was observed and measured at day 0, 10, 20 and 30 of study. The data collected were analysed using SPSS software (ver. 22) to study the association of HBOT towards healing of the diabetic foot ulcers.
RESULTS: Repeated Measures ANOVA analysis with Greenhouse-Geisser correction indicated that the means of wound size over time points (Day 0, 10, 20 and 30) among patients under HBOT group were statistically significantly different [F(1,61)=30.86, p<0.001)] compared to conventional therapy group. Multiple logistic regression analysis showed that HBOT group has nearly 44 times higher odds to achieve at least 30% wound size reduction within the study period (95%CI: 7.18, 268.97, p<0.001).
CONCLUSION: The results obtained in this study indicated that as an adjunctive therapy to conventional wound care, HBOT affected the rate of healing in diabetic foot ulcers significantly in terms of wound size reduction when compared to administering the conventional wound care alone.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: The panel consists of ten experts from ED that was randomly chosen from list of specialists obtained from the National Specialist Registry for Emergency Medicine. A set of questionnaires that contains item constructs related to KPI based on structure, outcome and process was developed from initial literature search from Pubmed Central, Google Scholar, Cochrane Database and Public Library of Sciences. The construct then used for FDM session in second phase of the study. In FDM phase, the experts will rank each of the items created from nominal group technique (NGT) session by using Likert Scale ranged from 1 to 5 ("1" totally disagree and "5" extremely agree). FDM prerequisite must include threshold value (d) ≤0.2, expert consensus of >75% and average fuzzy numbers ("A" value) of >0.5.
RESULTS: The initial item construct has produced 22 items proposed for the service KPI. Post FDM analysis for service KPI, 16 out of the 22 (72%) satisfied first prerequisite "d" value ≤0.2. For the second prerequisite, ten items (45%) from service KPI domain had expert consensus of more than 75%. For the third prerequisite, 16 out of the 22 (73%) fit the criteria of average fuzzy number ("A" value) of more than 0.5. In final model of FDM, 13 items (59%) were discarded and the remaining (n=9 items) that fulfilled all three prerequisites were retained for the final draft for content validation process.
CONCLUSION: This study introduces that FDM can be used to obtain experts' opinion and consensus in order to achieve a decision. The experts' consensus on the suitability of the pre-selected items on the KPI set were obtained, hence it is now ready for further applicability in the clinical setting in ED.
AIMS: Our objective was to compare and assess the correlation between the changes in capnographic indices and peak flow measurement in non-intubated acute asthmatic patients attending the emergency room.
METHODS: We carried out a prospective study in a university hospital emergency department (ED). One hundred and twenty eight patients with acute asthma were monitored with peak flow measurements and then had a nasal cannula attached for microstream sampling of expired carbon dioxide. The capnographic waveform was recorded onto a PC card for indices analysis. The patients were treated according to departmental protocols. After treatment, when they were adjudged well for discharge, a second set of results was obtained for peak flow measurements and capnographic waveform recording. The pre-treatment and post-treatment results were then compared with paired samples t-test analysis. Simple and canonical correlations were performed to determine correlations between the assessment methods. A p value of below 0.05 was taken to be significant.
RESULTS: Peak flow measurements showed significant improvements post-treatment (p < 0.001). On the capnographic waveform, there was a significant difference in the slope of phase 3 (p < 0.001) and alpha angle (p < 0.001), but not in phase 2 slope (p = 0.35). Correlation studies done between the assessment methods and indices readings did not show strong correlations either between the measurements or the magnitude of change pre-treatment and post-treatment.
CONCLUSION: Peak flow measurements and capnographic waveform indices can indicate improvements in airway diameter in acute asthmatics in the ED. Even though the two assessment methods did not correlate statistically, capnographic waveform analysis presents several advantages in that it is effort independent and provides continuous monitoring of normal tidal respiration. They can be proposed for the monitoring of asthmatics in the ED.