SciCombinator

In England between 2010 and 2013, just over one million recipients of the main out-of-work disability benefit had their eligibility reassessed using a new functional checklist-the Work Capability Assessment. Doctors and disability rights organisations have raised concerns that this has had an adverse effect on the mental health of claimants, but there are no population level studies exploring the health effects of this or similar policies.

Do patients' reports of their health care experiences reflect the quality of care? Despite the increasing role of such measures in research and policy, there’s no consensus regarding their legitimacy in quality assessment. Indeed, as physician and hospital compensation becomes increasingly tied to patient feedback, health care providers and academics are raising strong objections to the use of patient-experience surveys. These views are fueled by studies indicating that patient-experience measures at best have no relation to the quality of delivered care and at worst are associated with poorer patient outcomes. Conversely, other studies have found that better patient experiences - . . .

Novel interventions are needed to improve lifestyle and prevent noncommunicable diseases, the leading cause of death and disability globally. This study aimed to systematically review, synthesize, and grade scientific evidence on effectiveness of novel information and communication technology to reduce noncommunicable disease risk.

Timely assessment of the burden of HIV/AIDS is essential for policy setting and programme evaluation. In this report from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015 (GBD 2015), we provide national estimates of levels and trends of HIV/AIDS incidence, prevalence, coverage of antiretroviral therapy (ART), and mortality for 195 countries and territories from 1980 to 2015.

 To assess diagnostic accuracy of screening tests for pre-diabetes and efficacy of interventions (lifestyle or metformin) in preventing onset of type 2 diabetes in people with pre-diabetes.

The increasing prevalence of social media means that we often encounter written language characterized by both stylistic variation and outright errors. How does the personality of the reader modulate reactions to non-standard text? Experimental participants read ‘email responses’ to an ad for a housemate that either contained no errors or had been altered to include either typos (e.g., teh) or homophonous grammar errors (grammos, e.g., to/too, it’s/its). Participants completed a 10-item evaluation scale for each message, which measured their impressions of the writer. In addition participants completed a Big Five personality assessment and answered demographic and language attitude questions. Both typos and grammos had a negative impact on the evaluation scale. This negative impact was not modulated by age, education, electronic communication frequency, or pleasure reading time. In contrast, personality traits did modulate assessments, and did so in distinct ways for grammos and typos.

Excessive alcohol consumption is a leading cause of death and morbidity worldwide and interventions to help people reduce their consumption are needed. Interventions delivered by smartphone apps have the potential to help harmful and hazardous drinkers reduce their consumption of alcohol. However, there has been little evaluation of the effectiveness of existing smartphone interventions. A systematic review, amongst other methodologies, identified promising modular content that could be delivered by an app: self-monitoring and feedback; action planning; normative feedback; cognitive bias re-training; and identity change. This protocol reports a factorial randomised controlled trial to assess the comparative potential of these five intervention modules to reduce excessive alcohol consumption.

Lean is a widely used quality improvement methodology initially developed and used in the automotive and manufacturing industries but recently expanded to the healthcare sector. This systematic literature review seeks to independently assess the effect of Lean or Lean interventions on worker and patient satisfaction, health and process outcomes, and financial costs.

Journal policy on research data and code availability is an important part of the ongoing shift toward publishing reproducible computational science. This article extends the literature by studying journal data sharing policies by year (for both 2011 and 2012) for a referent set of 170 journals. We make a further contribution by evaluating code sharing policies, supplemental materials policies, and open access status for these 170 journals for each of 2011 and 2012. We build a predictive model of open data and code policy adoption as a function of impact factor and publisher and find higher impact journals more likely to have open data and code policies and scientific societies more likely to have open data and code policies than commercial publishers. We also find open data policies tend to lead open code policies, and we find no relationship between open data and code policies and either supplemental material policies or open access journal status. Of the journals in this study, 38% had a data policy, 22% had a code policy, and 66% had a supplemental materials policy as of June 2012. This reflects a striking one year increase of 16% in the number of data policies, a 30% increase in code policies, and a 7% increase in the number of supplemental materials policies. We introduce a new dataset to the community that categorizes data and code sharing, supplemental materials, and open access policies in 2011 and 2012 for these 170 journals.

The aim was to determine if bracket prescription has any effect on the subjective outcome of pre-adjusted edgewise treatment as judged by professionals. This retrospective observational assessment study was undertaken in the Orthodontic Department of the Charles Clifford Dental Hospital, Sheffield, UK. Forty sets of post-treatment study models from patients treated using a pre-adjusted edgewise appliance (20 Roth and 20 MBT) were selected. The models were masked and shown in a random order to nine experienced orthodontic clinicians, who were asked to assess the quality of the outcome, using a pre-piloted questionnaire. The principal outcome measure was the Incisor and Canine Aesthetic Torque and Tip (ICATT) score for each of the 40 post-treatment models carried out by the nine judges. A two-way analysis of variance was undertaken with the dependent variable, total ICATT score and independent variables, Bracket prescription (Roth or MBT) and Assessor. There were statistically significant differences between the subjective assessments of the nine judges (P<0.001), but there was no statistically significant difference between the two bracket prescriptions (P = 0.900). The best agreement between a clinician's judgment of prescription used and the actual prescription was fair (kappa statistic 0.25; CI -0.05 to 0.55). The ability to determine which bracket prescription was used was no better than chance for the majority of clinicians. Bracket prescription had no effect on the subjective aesthetic judgments of post-treatment study models made by nine experienced orthodontists.