Pragmatic procedures for detecting and documenting alcoholism in medical patients.

Although alcoholics are known to utilize a disproportionate amount of medical care, hospital patients are not routinely screened for alcoholism. A sample of 310 randomly selected patients from two hospitals were administered a structured diagnostic interview. More than one-third (35%) of the men and 14% of the women met DSM-III criteria for a current alcohol use disorder and an additional 27% of the men and 9% of the women met criteria for an alcohol use disorder in remission. The practicality and efficiency of structured interviews is discussed along with the potential of a small subset of items to serve as a screen for alcoholism.

Nursing Classification System: foundation for personnel planning and control.

This article demonstrates the usefulness of the Nursing Classification System (NCS) as an operational planning and control tool. Inherent in the NCS is sensitivity both to the quality of nursing care standards and to the variability in patient acuity levels. Consequently, the NCS provides a more effective basis for setting and monitoring productivity objectives in nursing service areas than cruder measures, such as full-time equivalents per patient day. Here the authors introduce and illustrate the concept of workload indexing, a means by which the NCS assists in defining staffing needs and monitoring workload and performance. The nursing administrator will gain insight into a simple and economical method of fiscal accountability for the personnel budget.