An accelerated perioperative care and rehabilitation protocol can be both cost-saving and clinically more effective after total hip arthroplasty, whereas it can be cost-saving with no observed significant difference in effect, from a societal perspective, after knee arthroplasty.

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In patients with low back pain for more than 6 weeks presenting with centralization or peripheralization of symptoms, we found the McKenzie method to be slightly more effective than manipulation when used adjunctive to information and advice.

Clinical nurses, who were research-active themselves, experienced more success in overcoming some of the barriers, which existed in applying research to practice. The research potential found amongst clinical nurses in Denmark needed to be further supported through training and guidance in research methodology, establishing introductory stipends and part-time research positions. By doing so, some of the barriers affecting research utilization and the so-called theory-practice gap might be reduced. Further empirical studies, based on Giddens theory of sociological reflectivity, might see clinical nurses in a more serious light and simultaneously perceive them as producers of knowledge.

Background: In Denmark, approximately 12,000 hip and knee arthroplasties were performed in 2006, and the hospital costs were close to US$ 110,000,000. In a randomized clinical trial, we have recently demonstrated the efficacy of accelerated perioperative care and rehabilitation intervention after hip and knee arthroplasty compared to current intervention under ideal circumstances. We do not, however, know whether these results could be reached under usual circumstances of healthcare practice. We therefore investigated whether length of stay after implementation of accelerated perioperative care and rehabilitation after hip and knee arthroplasty could be reduced in a normal healthcare setting, and how the achieved results matched those observed during the randomized clinical trial.

On entering higher education students become professionally socialized, and parallel with this, stereotyping takes place, students developing a more positive assessment of their own roles than those of other professions. This difference between the view of their own and other professions can contribute to creating cognitive and social boundaries between professions that hinder sharing of knowledge, which can result in poor cooperation. Interprofessional training can provide students with good clinical expertise in their own profession as well as teach them about other professions encouraging more positive attitudes between the professions. This project has taken place from 2004 to 2007 in a Danish Interprofessional Training Unit manned with students from the professions occupational therapy, physiotherapy, medicine and nursing. As part of an evaluation of the project, four focus group interviews and two in-depth interviews were analysed using the technique of Systematic Text Condensation. Results show that the goals of the Interprofessional Training Unit were fulfilled because the students learned interprofessional teamwork, strengthened their own professional role and worked together in an organization for the benefit of the patient. All this took place in a secure learning environment in which new methods of coordinating and integrating clinical and theoretical interprofessional learning were developed and tested.

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