Over recent years there has been an increasing prevalence of verbal and physical violence in Israel, including in the work place. Physicians are exposed to violence in hospitals and in the community. The objec...
Authors: Tal Carmi-Iluz, Roni Peleg, Tami Freud and Pesach Shvartzman
Governments often create policies that rely on implementation by arms length organizations and require practice changes on the part of different segments of the health care system without understanding the dif...
It is important that response rates to postal surveys are as high as possible to ensure that the results are representative and to maximise statistical power. Previous research has suggested that any personali...
Authors: Kirstie McKenzie-McHarg, Lucy Tully, Simon Gates, Sarah Ayers and Peter Brocklehurst
Failure to keep outpatient medical appointments results in inefficiencies and costs. The objective of this study is to show the factors in an existing electronic database that affect failed appointments and to...
Authors: Vernon J Lee, Arul Earnest, Mark I Chen and Bala Krishnan
Improving the quality of health care requires a range of evidence-based activities. Audit and feedback is commonly used as a quality improvement tool in the UK National Health Service [NHS]. We set out to asse...
Authors: R Foy, MP Eccles, G Jamtvedt, J Young, JM Grimshaw and R Baker
Exercise therapy (ET) is the main conservative and proven effective treatment of patients with intermittent claudication. Currently, the most frequent exercise prescription is a single 'go home and walk' advis...
Authors: EM Willigendael, BLW Bendermacher, C van der Berg, RJThJ Welten, MH Prins, RA Bie de and JAW Teijink
Despite cost containment efforts, parenteral (IV) ciprofloxacin appears to be overutilized at Vancouver General Hospital. In November 2003, the Pharmacist-managed intravenous to oral (IV-PO) Dosage Form Conver...
Authors: Bradley P Ho, Tim TY Lau, Robert M Balen, Terryn L Naumann and Peter J Jewesson
Patient choice is a major theme in current healthcare delivery. Little is known about patients' wishes regarding the timing of medical outpatient clinics.
Authors: Claire L Feeney, Nicola J Roberts and Martyn R Partridge
There are number of studies showing that general practice is one of the most stressful workplace among health care workers. Since Baltic States regained independence in 1990, the reform of the health care syst...
Authors: Giedrius Vanagas and Susanna Bihari-Axelsson
General opinion is that doctors are increasingly dissatisfied with their job, but few longitudinal studies exist. This study has been conducted to investigate a possible decline in professional and personal sa...
Authors: Magne Nylenna, Pål Gulbrandsen, Reidun Førde and Olaf G Aasland
Adult outpatient parenteral antibiotic therapy (OPAT) programs have been reported in the literature for over 20 years, however there are no published reports quantifying preference for treatment location of pa...
Authors: Carlo A Marra, Luciana Frighetto, Alan F Goodfellow, Amy O Wai, M Lynn Chase, Ruth E Nicol, Carole A Leong, Sally Tomlinson, Barbara M Ferreira and Peter J Jewesson
We sought to estimate the numbers of patients affected and deaths avoided by adopting the Leapfrog Group's recommended hospital procedure volume minimums for coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery and per...
Authors: Andrew J Epstein, Saif S Rathore, Harlan M Krumholz and Kevin GM Volpp
The Bulgarian and Greek Medical Care systems have been reformated the last fifteen years. The aim of this study was an examination and comparison of the Bulgarian and Greek Medical Care Systems.
To meet the universally recognised challenge of caring for people with long-term diseases many healthcare cultures are encouraging family physicians to develop specialist skills. We aimed to determine the majo...
Authors: Hilary Pinnock, Gopalakrishnan Netuveli, David Price and Aziz Sheikh
There are currently several concerns about the ways in which people are recruited to participate in randomised controlled trials, the low acceptance rates among people invited to participate, and the experienc...
Authors: Anne L Langston, Marion K Campbell, Vikki A Entwistle and Zoë Skea
Intermediate care was developed in order to bridge acute, primary and social care, primarily for elderly persons with complex care needs. Such bridging initiatives are intended to reduce hospital stays and imp...
Authors: Thomas Plochg, Diana MJ Delnoij, Tineke F van der Kruk, Tonnie ACM Janmaat and Niek S Klazinga
A recent article by Reeves et al. on the identification and resolution of ambiguities in the 1994 chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) research case definition recommended the Checklist Individual Strength, the Chalder...
The main objective of this study is to apply autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models to make real-time predictions on the number of beds occupied in Tan Tock Seng Hospital, during the recent SA...
Authors: Arul Earnest, Mark I Chen, Donald Ng and Leo Yee Sin
Among patients in skilled nursing facilities for post-acute care, increased registered nurse, total licensed staff, and nurse assistant staffing is associated with a decreased rate of hospital transfer for sel...
Authors: David A Ganz, Sandra F Simmons and John F Schnelle
There has been debate about the cost-effectiveness of photodynamic therapy (PDT), a treatment for neovascular age-related macular degeneration. We have been monitoring trends for the provision of PDT in the UK...
Authors: Robbie C Foy, Barny Foot, Jill Francis, Usha Chakravarthy and Richard PL Wormald
The description of patient travel patterns and variations in health care utilization may guide a sound health care planning process. In order to accurately describe these differences across regions with homoge...
Authors: Gunnar Klauss, Lukas Staub, Marcel Widmer and André Busato
We were commissioned to carry out three health assessments in urban areas of Dublin in Ireland. We required an epidemiologically robust method that could collect data rapidly and inexpensively. We were dealing...
Authors: Susan M Smith, Jean Long, Jillian Deady, Frances O'Keeffe, Deirdre Handy and Tom O'Dowd
Recognising that household interviews may produce biased estimates of health services utilisation, we examined for under- and over-reporting of hospitalisation episodes in three recent, consecutive population-...
Authors: Eva LH Tsui, Gabriel M Leung, Pauline PS Woo, Sarah Choi and Su-Vui Lo
A significant proportion of trial participants respond to placebos for a variety of conditions. Despite the common conduct of these trials and the strong emphasis placed on informed consent, very little is kno...
Authors: Zelda Di Blasi, Fay Crawford, Colin Bradley and Jos Kleijnen
It is estimated that approximately half of emergency department (ED) usage in the U.S. and other developed countries is for non-urgent conditions and that this usage is related to availability, social, and eco...
Authors: Anthony Suruda, Thomas J Burns, Stacey Knight and J Michael Dean
Executive walk rounds (EWRs) are a widely used but unstudied activity designed to improve safety culture in hospitals. Therefore, we measured the impact of EWRs on one important part of safety culture – provid...
Authors: Eric J Thomas, J Bryan Sexton, Torsten B Neilands, Allan Frankel and Robert L Helmreich
In recent years, Dutch general practitioner (GP) out-of-hours service has been reorganised into large-scale GP cooperatives. Until now little is known about GPs' experiences with working at these cooperatives ...
Authors: Caro JT van Uden, Fred HM Nieman, Gemma BWE Voss, Geertjan Wesseling, Ron AG Winkens and Harry FJM Crebolder
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disease which at present has no cure, and it usually results in severe disability. The burden of PD increases as the illness progresses, resulting in the...
Authors: Marco Cosentino, Emilia Martignoni, Donatella Michielotto, Daniela Calandrella, Giulio Riboldazzi, Claudio Pacchetti, Gianmario Frigo, Giuseppe Nappi and Sergio Lecchini
Systems that are used by different organisations to grade the quality of evidence and the strength of recommendations vary. They have different strengths and weaknesses. The GRADE Working Group has developed a...
Authors: David Atkins, Peter A Briss, Martin Eccles, Signe Flottorp, Gordon H Guyatt, Robin T Harbour, Suzanne Hill, Roman Jaeschke, Alessandro Liberati, Nicola Magrini, James Mason, Dianne O'Connell, Andrew D Oxman, Bob Phillips, Holger Schünemann, Tessa Tan-Torres Edejer…
While the Iranian nursing profession tries to reach to its full capacity for participating in the maintenance of public health, its desire to develop is strongly influenced by cultural, economic, and religious...
Authors: Mohsen Adib Hajbaghery and Mahvash Salsali
Proposals to expand Medicare coverage tend to be expensive, but the value of services purchased is not known. This study evaluates the efficiency of the average private supplemental insurance plan for Medicare...
Authors: Peter Franks, Peter Muennig and Marthe Gold
In British Columbia, Canada, all necessary medical services are funded publicly. Concerned with growing wait lists in the mid-1990s, the provincial government started providing extra funding for coronary arter...
Authors: Adrian R Levy, Boris G Sobolev, Robert Hayden, Michael Kiely, J Mark FitzGerald and Martin T Schechter
Inexpensive antihypertensive drugs are at least as effective and safe as more expensive drugs. Overuse of newer, more expensive antihypertensive drugs is a poor use of resources. The potential savings are subs...
Outreach facilitation has been proven successful in improving the adoption of clinical preventive care guidelines in primary care practice. The net costs and savings of delivering such an intensive interventio...
Authors: William Hogg, Neill Baskerville and Jacques Lemelin
Treatment delay in first episode psychosis is common. As general practitioners are the first point of contact for many individuals with first episode psychosis, they are well placed to detect the early symptom...
Authors: Lynda Tait, Helen Lester, Max Birchwood, Nick Freemantle and Sue Wilson
The AGREE instrument has been validated for evaluating Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG) pertaining to medical care. This study evaluated the reliability and validity of physical therapists using the AGREE to...
Authors: Joy C MacDermid, Dina Brooks, Sherra Solway, Sharon Switzer-McIntyre, Lucie Brosseau and Ian D Graham
Studies conducted in developed countries using economic models show that individual- and household- level variables are important determinants of health insurance ownership. There is however a dearth of such s...
Authors: Joses M Kirigia, Luis G Sambo, Benjamin Nganda, Germano M Mwabu, Rufaro Chatora and Takondwa Mwase
Quality of care from the perspective of users is increasingly used in evaluating health care performance. Going beyond satisfaction studies, quality of care from the users' perspective is conceptualised in two...
Authors: Peter P Groenewegen, Jan J Kerssens, Herman J Sixma, Ingrid van der Eijk and Wienke GW Boerma
Administrative health care databases may be particularly useful for injury surveillance, given that they are population-based, readily available, and relatively complete. Surveillance based on administrative d...
Authors: Beth K Potter, Douglas Manuel, Kathy N Speechley, Iris A Gutmanis, M Karen Campbell and John J Koval
Due to the complexity of health system reform in the post-conflict, post-disaster, and development settings, attempts to restructure health services are fraught with pitfalls that are often unanticipated becau...
Authors: Brett D Nelson, Kerry Dierberg, Milena Šćepanović, Mihajlo Mitrović, Miloš Vuksanović, Ljiljana Milić and Michael J VanRooyen
Seasonality is a common feature of communicable diseases. Less well understood is whether seasonal patterns occur for non-communicable diseases. The overall effect of seasonal fluctuations on hospital admissio...
Authors: Ross EG Upshur, Rahim Moineddin, Eric Crighton, Lori Kiefer and Muhammad Mamdani
The aim of this body of research is to determine whether injuries in the home are more common in particular types of housing. Previous home injuries research has tended to focus on behaviours or the provision ...
Authors: Robert G Newcombe, Ronan A Lyons, Sarah J Jones and Joanne Patterson
The increasing prevalence and impact of obstructive lung diseases and new insights, reflected in clinical guidelines, have led to concerns about the diagnosis and therapy of asthma and COPD in primary care. In...
Authors: Antonius Schneider, Lutz Gantner, Inko Maag, Mathias M Borst, Michel Wensing and Joachim Szecsenyi
In quality of care research, limited information is found on the relationship between quality of care and disease outcomes. This case-control study was conducted with the aim to assess the effect of guideline ...
Authors: Johan S de Koning, Niek S Klazinga, Peter J Koudstaal, Ad Prins, Gerard JJM Borsboom and Johan P Mackenbach
Swedish patient associations for breast cancer patients (PABCPs) offer patients with breast cancer unlimited meetings with a breast cancer survivor, a contact person (CP). We applied the voluntary action persp...
Authors: Christina Carlsson, Mef Nilbert and Kerstin Nilsson
Priority setting, also known as rationing or resource allocation, occurs at all levels of every health care system. Daniels and Sabin have proposed a framework for priority setting in health care institutions ...
Authors: David Reeleder, Douglas K Martin, Christian Keresztes and Peter A Singer
There has been increasing interest in enhancing accountability in health care. As such, several methods have been developed to compare the quality of home care services. These comparisons can be problematic if...
Authors: Dawn M Dalby, John P Hirdes and Brant E Fries
In recent years out-of-hours primary care in the Netherlands has changed from practice-based to large-scale cooperatives. The purpose of this study is to determine patient satisfaction with current out-of-hour...
Authors: CJT van Uden, AJHA Ament, SO Hobma, PJ Zwietering and HFJM Crebolder
Several HIV prevention programs use data on condom sales and survey-based data on condom prevalence to monitor progress. However, such indicators are not always consistent. This paper aims to explain these inc...
