Animation program used to encourage patients or family members to take an active role for eliminating wrong-site, wrong-person, wrong-procedure surgeries: preliminary evaluation.

BACKGROUND: Wrong-site surgeries (including wrong-site, wrong-person and wrong-procedure errors) remain the number one problem among adverse events of health care delivery. Patients and/or family members should be involved when possible to help prevent such errors. AIMS: 1) Design an educational animation program about patient safety for patients and/or family members to help eliminate wrong-site surgery errors. 2) Evaluate its educational effect. METHODS: The animation developed for this study includes an introduction, hypothetical story, and guided information, and was presented at a tertiary medical center in northern Taiwan. A single-group pretest and posttest design was used. RESULTS: Forty-six patients and 48 family members participated in the study. The pre-training score was 3.6 (on a scale of 1-4). After watching the animation, there was no significant increase (0.08 ± 0.5) for the patient group, but the family member group showed significant improvement (0.21 ± 0.6, P = .0309). Most participants (98.9%) were satisfied with the animation. CONCLUSION: The majority of participants reported good practices for avoiding wrong-site surgery mistakes before an operation. A significant improvement of post-training scores in the family member group was seen. The high satisfaction rating given by the participants after seeing the animation indicates that it was generally acceptable.

Modulation of human UMP/CMP kinase affects activation and cellular sensitivity of deoxycytidine analogs.

Deoxycytidine analogs are an important class of clinically active antiviral and anticancer agents. The stepwise phosphorylation of these analogs to triphosphate metabolites is crucial for biological action. Human UMP/CMP kinase (UMP/CMPK; cytidylate kinase; EC 2.7.4.14) is thought to be responsible for phosphorylation of UMP, CMP, and dCMP and may also play an important role in the activation of pyrimidine analogs. However, no evidence has verified this notion in intact cells. In this study we explored the functional roles of UMP/CMPK in natural pyrimidine synthesis and metabolism of deoxycytidine analogs, as well as 5-FU in HeLa S3 and HCT8 cells. The amounts of UMP/CMPK protein in different cell lines correlated with UMP, CMP, and dCMP kinase activities and amounts of UMP/CMPK RNA. Modulation of UMP/CMPK by overexpression or down-regulation had no impact on natural pyrimidine nucleotides and cell growth. However, down-regulating UMP/CMPK expression by siRNA led to a decrease in the formation of the triphosphate metabolites, resulting in cellular resistance to these analogs. More diphosphate and triphosphate metabolites of deoxycytidine analogs were detected and cellular sensitivity to these agents was increased in the UMP/CMPK-overexpressing cells. This study indicates that the second step enzyme (UMP/CMPK) is responsible for the phosphorylation of pyrimidine analogs and also has an impact on cellular sensitivity to these analogs in those cell lines.