Optimal Home Care Research Articles

Factors predicting satisfactory home care after stroke.

This study prospectively investigated factors predicting optimal poststroke home care. One hundred and thirty-five first occurrence stroke patients and their primary support persons were evaluated during the initial hospitalization after stroke and again one year poststroke. Discriminant function analysis was used to identify two groups from the baseline data: home care situations which were rated optimal and those which were not. Group membership was predicted and validated with 72.6% accuracy. Patients at risk for less than optimal home care had caregivers who were (1) more likely to be depressed, (2) less likely to be married to the patient, (3) below average in knowledge about stroke care, and (4) reporting more family dysfunction. Our findings suggest that caregiver-related problems can have a collective effect on rehabilitation outcome and that treatment should reduce caregiver depression, minimize family dysfunction, and increase the family's knowledge about stroke care.

Height-Weight Variability from Birth to Five Years of Age for Children Reared with Optimal Pediatric and Home Care

Height-Weight Variability from Birth to Five Years of Age for Children Reared with Optimal Pediatric and Home Care

GROWTH NORMS FROM BIRTH TO THE AGE OF FIVE YEARS

Height-weight norms for boys and girls are presented here to meet a need long felt by many pediatricians, who have found most charts of growth norms for children up to 5 years of age unsatisfactory on two counts. In the first place, norms such as those of Woodbury 1 and of Baldwin and Wood 2 have appeared to be too low for children reared with optimal (or at least above the average for the population) pediatric and home care. In the second place, for such children there has been lacking an adequate set of norms of weights for varying heights at given months of age through the first 5 years of life. We shall present (1) a description of the type of pediatric care given the boys and girls whose height-weight measurements were used; (2) a description of the type of feeding; (3) a statistical summary of the sample of