BACKGROUND: The complexity of HIV/AIDS raises challenges for the effective delivery of care. It is important to ensure that the expertise and experience of care providers is of high quality. Training and experience of HIV/AIDS providers may impact not only individual patient outcomes but increasingly on health care costs as well. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this review is to assess the effects of provider training and experience on people living with HIV/AIDS on the following outcomes: immunological (ie. viral load, CD4 count), medical (ie. mortality, proportion on antiretrovirals), psychosocial (ie. quality of life measures) and economic outcomes (ie health care costs).

The objective of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to examine the association between hospital, clinic and provider patient volumes on HIV/AIDS patient outcomes including mortality, antiretroviral (ARV) use and proportion of patients on indicated opportunistic infection (OI) prophylaxis. We searched MEDLINE and nine other electronic databases from 1 January 1980 through 29 May 2009. Experimental and controlled observational studies of persons with HIV/AIDS were included. Studies examined the volume or concentration of patients with HIV/AIDS in hospitals, clinics or individual providers. Outcomes included mortality, ARV use and proportion of patients on indicated OI prophylaxis. We reviewed 22,692 titles and/or abstracts. Patient characteristics, study design, volume measures, medical outcomes and study confounders were abstracted. Data were extracted independently by two reviewers. Twenty-two studies were included in the final review. High volume hospital care was associated with lower in-hospital mortality (pooled odds ratio (OR) 0.71, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.57-0.90 p = 0.004) and lower mortality 30 days from admission (pooled OR 0.62, 95% CI 0.47-0.81 p = 0.0004). Higher volume provider care was associated with significantly higher ARV use (pooled OR 4.41, 95% CI 2.70-7.18 p<0.00001). Differences in volume definitions and controlling for confounding variables did not appreciably alter the results. Higher volume hospitals, clinics and providers were associated with significantly decreased mortality for people living with HIV/AIDS and higher volume providers and clinics had higher ARV use. Heterogeneity of volume thresholds and absence of studies from resource-limited settings are major limitations.

Few randomized clinical trials have been conducted. Most studies have methodological limitations and small sample size. There is an urgent need for well-designed randomized clinical trials using age-appropriate validated outcome measures.

The objective of this systematic review was to examine the effectiveness of the organization of care: case management, multidisciplinary care, multi-faceted treatment, hours of service, outreach programs and health information systems on medical, immunological, virological, psychosocial and economic outcomes for persons living with HIV/AIDS. We searched PubMed (MEDLINE) and 10 other electronic databases from 1 January 1980 to April, 2012 for both experimental and controlled observational studies. Thirty-three studies met the inclusion criteria. Eleven studies were randomized controlled trials (RCTs), three of which were conducted in low-middle income settings. Patient characteristics, study design, organization measures and outcomes data were abstracted independently by two reviewers from all studies. A risk of bias tool was applied to RCTs and a separate tool was used to assess the quality of observational studies. This review concludes that case management interventions were most consistently associated with improvements in immunological outcomes but case management demonstrates no clear association with other outcome measures. The same mixed results were also identified for multidisciplinary and multi-faceted care interventions. Eight studies with an outreach intervention were identified and demonstrated improvements or non-inferiority with respect to mortality, receipt of antiretroviral medications, immunological outcomes, improvements in healthcare utilization and lower reported healthcare costs when compared to usual care. Of the interventions examined in this review, sustained in-person case management and outreach interventions were most consistently associated with improved medical and economic outcomes, in particular antiretroviral prescribing, immunological outcomes and healthcare utilization. No firm conclusions can be reached about the impact of any one intervention on patient mortality.

BackgroundMotor vehicle collisions (MVCs) that result in one or more fatalities on the 400-series Highways represent a serious public health problem in Ontario, and were estimated to have cost $11 billion in 2004. To date, no studies have examined risk factors for fatal MVCs on Ontario’s 400 series highways.The investigate how demographic and environmental risk factors are associated with fatal MVCs on Ontario’s 400-Series Highways.MethodsData were provided from the Ontario Ministry of Transport database, and included driver demographics, vehicle information, environmental descriptors, structural descriptors, as well as collision information (date and time), and severity of the collision. Multivariate analysis was used to identify factors significantly associated with the odds of dying in a collision.ResultsThere were 53,526 vehicles involved in collisions from 2001 to 2006 included in our analysis. Results from the multivariate analysis suggest that collisions with older age and male drivers were associated with an increased risk of involving a fatality. Highway 405 and an undivided 2-way design proved to be the most fatal structural configurations. Collisions in the summer, Fridays, between 12 am-4 am, and in drifting snow conditions during the wintertime were also shown to have a significantly increased risk of fatality.ConclusionOur results suggest that interventions to reduce deaths as a result of MVCs should focus on both driver-related and road-related modifications.