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Performance indicators in the long term care sector are important to evaluate the efficiency and quality of care delivery. We are, however, still far from being able to refer to a common set of indicators at t...
Township-village health centers in rural areas play an important role in health service system in China. In East China’s Jiangsu Province, the City of Haimen privatized all 25 township-village health centers i...
In 2007, a national heat plan was introduced in the Netherlands to effectively protect vulnerable populations (such as institutionalised elderly people) against heatwaves. The aim of this study was to assess t...
Post-conflict Liberia has one of the fastest growing populations on the continent and one of the highest maternal mortality rates among the world. However, in the rural regions, less than half of all births ar...
There is growing recognition internationally of the need to identify women with risk factors for poor perinatal mental health in pregnancy and following birth. In the state of New South Wales, Australia the Su...
The increasing number of patients with chronic diseases represents a challenge for health care systems. The Chronic Care Model suggests a multi-component remodelling of chronic disease services to improve pati...
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic disease that affects mainly adults in the prime of their lives. However, few studies report the impact of high annual relapse rates on outcomes. The purpose of this study w...
Healthcare policy appears to treat healthcare organisations as being homogenous, despite evidence that they vary considerably. This study develops a taxonomy of primary health care practices using characterist...
Worldwide, the organisation of diabetes care is changing. As a result general practices and diabetes teams in hospitals are becoming part of new organisations in which multidisciplinary care programs are imple...
Routine follow-up following uncomplicated surgery is being delivered by telephone in some settings. Telephone consultations may be preferable to patients and improve outpatient resource use. We aimed to compar...
Stroke services are a form of integrated care which have been introduced in many countries, including the Netherlands, to improve health outcomes and processes of care by connecting the acute, rehabilitative, ...
Sophisticated recommendation systems are used more and more in the health sector to assist consumers in healthy decision making. In this study we investigate consumers' evaluation of hypothetical health recomm...
Telephone or text-message reminders have been shown to significantly reduce the rate of missed appointments in different medical settings. Since text-messaging is less resource-demanding, we tested the hypothe...
The editors of BMC Health Services Research would like to thank all our reviewers who have contributed to the journal in 2012.
The prescription of fixed-dose combinations (FDC) of antihypertensive drugs has increased rapidly since the relaxation of the prescription-term restriction.
Miscarriage is common and often managed by specialists in the operating room despite evidence that office-based manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) is safe, effective, and saves time and money. Family Medicine resi...
Falls are a serious problem for hospitalized patients, reducing the duration and quality of life. It is estimated that over 84% of all adverse events in hospitalized patients are related to falls. Some fall ri...
Different models for care pathways involving both specialist and primary care have been developed to ensure adequate follow-up after discharge. These care pathways have mainly been developed and run by special...
Patient and provider-related factors affecting access to cardiac rehabilitation (CR) have been extensively studied, but health-system administration factors have not. The objectives of this study were to inves...
Care coordination has increasingly been recognized as an important aspect of high-quality health care delivery. Robust measures of coordination processes will be essential tools to evaluate, guide and support ...
There is growing evidence that home telemonitoring can be advantageous in societies with increasing prevalence of chronic diseases.
Self-management support is a key component of effective chronic care management, yet in practice appears to be the least implemented and most challenging. This study explores whether and how self-management su...
There is a growing interest in examining the current state of care and identifying opportunities for improving care and reducing costs at the end of life. The aim of this study is to examine patterns of health...
The quality of care of patients dying in the hospital is often judged as insufficient. This article describes the protocol of a study to assess the quality of care of the dying patient and the contribution of ...
The World Health Report 2000 stated that increased public financing for healthcare was an integral part of the efforts to achieve equity of access. In 2009, the Chinese government launched a three-year health ...
The knowledge on emergency obstetric care (EmOC) is limited in Kenya, where only partial data from sub-national studies exist. The EmOC process indicators have also not been integrated into routine health mana...
The concept of organizational culture is important in understanding the behaviour of individuals in organizations as they manage external demands and internal social changes. Cyprus healthcare system is under ...
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are often proposed as ‘technological fixes’ for problems facing healthcare. They promise to deliver services more quickly and cheaply. Yet research on the impl...
Patient compliance is a key factor in treatment success. Satisfied patients are more likely to utilize health services, comply with medical treatment, and continue with the health care providers. Yet, the nati...
The Emergency Department (ED) is consistently described as a high-risk environment for patients and clinicians that demands colleagues quickly work together as a cohesive group. Communication between nurses, p...
Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral for Treatment (SBIRT) is an effective approach for managing alcohol and other drug misuse in primary care; however, uptake into routine care has been limited. Uptake...
Hospital malnutrition is an underestimated problem and as many as half of malnourished patients do not receive appropriate treatment. In order to extend the management of malnutrition in health care facilities...
The scientific literature continues to advocate interprofessional collaboration (IPC) as a key component of primary care. It is recommended that primary care groups be created and configured to meet the health...
Organised colorectal cancer screening is likely to be cost-effective, but cost-effectiveness results alone may not help policy makers to make decisions about programme feasibility or service providers to plan ...
Tens of millions of patients worldwide suffer from avoidable disabling injuries and death every year. Measuring the safety climate in health care is an important step in improving patient safety. The most comm...
Aligned with the international call for universal coverage of affordable and quality health care, the government of Tajikistan is undertaking reforms of its health system aiming amongst others at reducing the ...
The impact of unmet eye care needs in sub-Saharan Africa is compounded by barriers to accessing eye care, limited engagement with communities, a shortage of appropriately skilled health personnel, and inadequa...
Patient Centred Tuberculosis Treatment (PCT) is a promising treatment delivery strategy for Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB). It aims to improve adherence to treatment by giving patients the choice of having dr...
A plethora of clinical studies have assessed the benefits of implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) and supported their use in clinical practice. However, evidence on the safety and efficacy of ICDs ap...
Tuberculosis still remains a major cause of maternal and newborn morbidity and mortality. Integrating tuberculosis screening and detection into postnatal care services ensures prompt and appropriate treatment ...
Patient-centeredness is a key component of health care quality. However, patient-centered measures of quality have not been developed in injury care. In response to this challenge, we developed the Quality of ...
Couple HIV testing has been recognized as critical to increase uptake of HIV testing, facilitate disclosure of HIV status to marital partner, improve access to treatment, care and support, and promote safe sex...
In the U.S., economic conditions are intertwined with labor market decisions, access to health care, health care utilization and health outcomes. The Veterans Affairs (VA) health care system has served as a sa...
An emergency department (ED) should offer timely care for acutely ill or injured persons that require the attention of specialized nurses and physicians. This study was aimed at exploring what is actually goin...
The aim of this paper is to share the results of a scoping review that examined the relationship between health care disparities and the multiplicity of vulnerability factors that are often clustered together.
Cancer survivors are a rapidly growing and aging population in the U.S., but there are many challenges associated with the survivorship experience such as functional disabilities and psychosocial distress. Whe...
Ensuring access to timely and appropriate primary healthcare for people living in poverty is an issue facing all countries, even those with universal healthcare systems. The transformation of healthcare practi...
The treatment for deep surgical site infection (SSI) following primary total hip arthroplasty (THA) varies internationally and it is at present unclear which treatment approaches are used in Australia. The aim...
This paper presents the evaluation of “Moving On”, a generic self-management program for people with a chronic illness developed by Arthritis NSW. The program aims to help participants identify their need for ...
Palliative care is a policy priority internationally. In England, policymakers are seeking to develop high quality care for all by focusing on reducing the number of patients who die in acute hospitals. It is ...
