Bert Aertgeerts

TL;DR: Being a simplified version of the Cluzeau instrument, the AGREE instrument has the most potential to serve as a basis for the development of an appraisal tool for clinical pathways, however, important limitations will have to be dealt with when developing such a tool.

TL;DR: Several clinical features are useful to increase or decrease the probability that a child has a serious infection, but none is sufficient on its own to substantially raise or lower the risk of serious infection.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors compared the results of tests performed during physical examination on patients with low-back pain and sciatica with those of diagnostic imaging (MRI, CT, myelography) or findings at surgery.

TL;DR: The most useful clinical features for ruling in serious infection was parental or clinician overall concern that the illness was different from previous illnesses or that something was wrong as mentioned in this paper, and the best performing clinical prediction rule was a five-stage decision tree rule, consisting of the physician's gut feeling, dyspnoea, temperature ≥ 40 °C, diarrhoea and age.

TL;DR: It is concluded that published RCTs have no clear definitions of their palliative care patients and the diversity of this patient is illustrated to illustrate the lack of consensus concerning the attributes of illnesses needing palliation and the ambiguous use of the adjective ‘palliative’.