Vanessa Meterko

• Project Manager at Innocence Project

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, many innocent people have been wrongfully convicted not only because of faulty evidence, but also because of official forms of misconduct. The incidents are well documented; but no data exists on the question of how to define it. We surveyed 355 state and federal judges about their perceptions of...

Psychological heuristics are an adaptive part of human cognition, helping us operate efficiently in a world full of complex stimuli. However, these mental shortcuts also have the potential to undermine the search for truth in a criminal investigation. We reviewed 30 social science research papers on cognitive biases in criminal case evaluations (i....

The extent to which cognitive biases may influence decision-making in forensic science is an important question with implications for training and practice. We conducted a systematic review of the literature on cognitive biases in forensic science disciplines. The initial literature search including electronic searching of three databases (two soci...

In recent years, there has been a growth of literature examining the mental health impacts of microaggressions, which are defined as subtle forms of discrimination toward oppressed groups. The current study utilized a qualitative focus group method and directed content analysis to categorize several types of sexual orientation microaggressions that...

Previous literature on microaggressions has suggested that oppressed groups including lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) persons are affected by overt discrimination. However, there has been little research to explore how LGB individuals cope with microaggressions (subtle forms of discrimination), or how microaggressions affect their mental health. T...

To develop a template to promote brief but high-quality communication between paediatric primary care clinicians and consulting specialists. Through an iterative process with academic and community-based paediatric primary care providers and specialists, the authors identified what content elements would be of value when communicating around referr...

Clear and complete communication between health care providers is a prerequisite for safe patient management and is a major priority of the Joint Commission's 2008 National Patient Safety Goals. The goal of this study was to describe nurses' perceptions of nurse-physician communication in the long-term care (LTC) setting. Mixed-method study includi...

PurposeTo describe the concerns raised by health plan members, providers and purchasers related to studying the comparative effectiveness of therapeutics using cluster randomized trials (CRTs) within health plans. An additional goal was to develop recommendations for increasing acceptability.Methods Eighty-four qualitative in-depth telephone interv...

"Cluster randomized trials," in which groups of patients are randomly assigned to different therapeutic interventions, provide a powerful way of evaluating drugs. CRTs have not been widely used, in good part because of concerns about whether patients must give informed consent to participate in them. A better understanding of how CRTs fit into clin...

An estimated 20-50% of patients do not take medications as recommended. Accepting a doctor's recommendation is the first step in medication adherence, yet little is known about patients' beliefs and preferences about how medications are prescribed. To explore patients' beliefs and preferences about medication prescribing to understand factors that...

Cluster randomized trials (CRTs) offer unique advantages over standard randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs) and observational methodologies, and may provide a cost-efficient alternative for answering questions about the best treatments for common conditions. To describe health plan leaders' views on CRTs, identify barriers to conducting CRT...

BACKGROUND: Cluster randomized trials (CRTs) offer unique advantages over standard randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs) and observational methodologies, and may provide a cost-efficient alternative for answering questions about the best treatments for common conditions. OBJECTIVES: To describe health plan leaders' views on CRTs, identify ba...

Professionalism is fundamental to the practice of medicine. Objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) have been proposed as appropriate for assessing some aspects of professionalism. This study investigated how raters assign professionalism ratings to medical students' performances in OSCE encounters. Three standardised patients, 3 doctor...

Dietary supplementation with fruit or vegetable extracts can ameliorate age-related declines in measures of learning, memory, motor performance, and neuronal signal transduction in a rat model. To date, blueberries have proved most effective at improving measures of motor performance, spatial learning and memory, and neuronal functioning in old rat...