Publicaties

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this review is to assess trends in guideline implementation, including the interventions used, rationale provided, and the impact on patient or health care professional knowledge, behavior or outcomes. INTRODUCTION: Gui...

AIMS: Online interventions reduce the treatment gap between the number of people with alcohol misuse and people who actually receive help. This study investigated the effectiveness and predictors of success of a Belgian online help programme. METH...

OBJECTIVE: To estimate the rate and type of downstream activities (DAs) after laboratory testing in primary care, with a specific focus on check-up laboratory panels, and to explore the effect of a clinical decision support system (CDSS) for labor...

BACKGROUND: Coping with a chronic disease can be really challenging. Self-management represents a promising strategy to improve daily life experiences. The role of primary healthcare professionals cannot be underestimated in supporting self-manage...

INTRODUCTION: In sub-Saharan Africa, there is a need to better understand and guide the practice of primary care physicians (PCPs), especially in a crisis context like the COVID-19 pandemic. This study analyses the experiences of PCPs facing COVID...

High-quality care for patients with COPD is necessary. To achieve quality improvement in primary care, the general practitioner and the electronic health record (EHR) play an important role. The aim of this study was to develop a set of evidence-b...

We wanted to investigate the relationship of medical and non-medical factors with the clinical decision-making of pediatricians. We hypothesize that the addition of relevant medical information (either alarming or reassuring) will influence the ph...

Background: When confronting a partner’s diagnosis of advanced cancer, family caregivers are often protected against severe psychological illness by their mental resilience. However, the current COVID-19 pandemic endangers this resilience through ...

We wanted to investigate the relationship of medical and non-medical factors with the clinical decision-making of pediatricians. We hypothesize that the addition of relevant medical information (either alarming or reassuring) will influence the ph...

Accepted abstract and poster presentation at the 4th National Point of Care Testing Symposium.

BACKGROUND: Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are one of the most common infections in nursing homes (NHs). A high error rate of a UTI diagnosis based solely on clinical criteria is to be expected in older persons as they often present infections in...

BACKGROUND: Prognostic models can help to identify patients at risk for end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) at an earlier stage to provide preventive medical interventions. Previous studies mostly applied the Cox proportional hazards model. The aim of...

BACKGROUND: There is a trend towards decentralisation of laboratory tests by means of Point-of-Care testing (POCT). Within hospitals, Belgian law requires a POCT policy, coordinated by the clinical laboratory. There is however no legal framework f...

Multinational surveillance programmes for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) are dependent on national structures for data collection. This study aimed to capture the diversity of national MRSA surveillance programmes and to propos...

BACKGROUND: In times of COVID-19, we are challenged to experiment with alternative platforms or software to connect people. In particular, the struggle that arose in health research was how to interact with patients and care professionals. The lat...

OBJECTIVE: After stratifying for age, sex and multimorbidity at baseline, our aim is to analyse time trends in incident multimorbidity and polypharmacy in the 15-year clinical trajectories of individual patients in a family medicine setting. METHO...

BACKGROUND: In non-randomized studies (NRSs) where a continuous outcome variable (e.g., depressive symptoms) is assessed at baseline and follow-up, it is common to observe imbalance of the baseline values between the treatment/exposure group and c...

In April 2020, Belgium experienced high numbers of fatal COVID-19 cases among nursing home (NH) residents. In response, a mass testing campaign was organised testing all NH residents and staff. We analysed the data of Flemish NHs to identify insti...

BACKGROUND: Fever is a common symptom of benign childhood illness but a high fever may be a sign of a serious infection. Temperature is often used by parents to check for illness in their children, and the presence of a high temperature can act as...

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 has changed General Practice (GP) education as well as GP clinical activities. These changes have had an impact on the well-being of medical trainees and the role of GP plays in the society. We have therefore aimed to investig...

BACKGROUND: Belgium monitors the burden of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) and antimicrobial use in nursing homes (NHs) by participating in the European point prevalence surveys (PPSs) organised in long-term care facilities (HALT surveys)....