Analyzing Apparent Causes of 30-Day Readmissions to Acute Care From Skilled Nursing Facilities.

This quality improvement project implemented a bidirectional apparent cause analysis of patients readmitted to 1 hospital from 8 skilled nursing facilities (SNFs). The purpose of the project was to receive input from both hospital and SNF nursing staff to critically examine the apparent causes of SNF readmissions from both settings and identify opportunities for improvement. Nurse-led measures to prevent readmissions can be found in 5 domains: improved collaboration, communication, coordination, clarification, and cause analysis.

The impact of lexical frequency on sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment.

Children with SLI generally exhibit poor sentence comprehension skills. We examined the specific impact of grammatical complexity and lexical frequency on comprehension performance, yielding contrasting results. The present study sheds new light on sentence comprehension in children with SLI by investigating a linguistic factor which has attracted little research interest: the impact of the lexical frequency of known words on sentence comprehension. We also examined the impact of grammatical complexity and sentence length by independently varying these two factors. Fifteen children with SLI, 15 age- and IQ-matched controls, and 15 controls matched on lexical and grammatical skills, performed sentence comprehension tasks in which three linguistic factors were manipulated: lexical frequency (sentences containing words of either low or high lexical frequency), grammatical complexity (sentence containing either a subject relative clause or an object relative clause) and sentence length (either short or long sentences). Results indicated that children with SLI performed more poorly overall compared to age- and IQ-matched children and to lexical and morphosyntactic age-matched children. However, their performance was not more affected by either sentence length or clause type than that of control children. Only lexical frequency affected sentence comprehension to a greater extent in children with SLI relative to the control groups, revealing that SLI children's sentence comprehension abilities are particularly affected by the presence of low-frequency but familiar words.