INTRODUCTION An economically mature health care market has led to increased cost competition. Subsequently, a perceived need for productivity-based physician compensation has developed. While some institutions have rewarded individual productivity based on specific facets of academic responsibility, such as teaching, research, and patient care, we chose to develop an incentive compensation syst...

BACKGROUND Medical residents play two roles that enter into conflict during their educational period: trainees and workers. This dual role can lead to dissatisfaction among residents that can affect both the quality of the services they provide to citizens and the proper functioning of the health services model itself. AIM To analyse discrepancies between the preferences and expectations of f...

OBJECTIVES A recent study identified patients in six distinct response groups based on their evaluations of outcomes related to overall satisfaction, malpractice and benefit of treatment. This study validates the response clusters by analysing and comparing open-ended comments from the extreme positive and extreme negative response groups. DESIGN Qualitative content analysis. SETTING Data f...

Background Patients’ attending UK primary care currently receive first-contact care services from nurses as well as general practitioners (GPs). Although randomised trials have reported higher satisfaction following nurse consultations, the relationship between patients’ prior expectations and satisfaction for nurse consultations has not been fully explored. Objective To explore patients’ expec...

In this paper we try to improve the humanmachine interaction of a voice-activated system by adding prosodic characteristics to the system. We focus on verbal hesitation, which is manifested by speech disfluencies. In humanhuman communication recent research shows that moderate disfluencies make speakers more credible. In addition, people tend to react more leniently to an erroneous answer, if t...

Over the last two decades, Jordan has suffered a chronic water crisis, and is the tenth most water-scarce nation on Earth. Such water stress has been well illustrated in the case of Greater Amman, the capital, which has grown dramatically from a population of around 2000 in the 1920s, to 2.17 million today. One of the distinctive characteristics of the water supply regime of Greater Amman is th...

There is an increasing use of modern information technology (IT) in nearly all parts of business life – and inter-organizational relationships are no exemption from this. However the role of IT in relationships is not really understood so far. In this paper we analyze the role of IT in relation to customer satisfaction in business-to-business relationships. We argue that the way in which a cust...

Scales representing ambient conditions, ability to navigate the slot floor, cleanliness, interior decor and seating comfort all produce a significant effect on slot servicescape satisfaction. Scales representing slot servicescape satisfaction and gaming value produce significant effects on overall satisfaction with the slot experience. Overall satisfaction with the slot experience produces a si...

OBJECTIVE To develop a single, short, acceptable, and validated postal questionnaire for assessing patients' experiences of the process and outcome of day surgery. DESIGN Interviews and review of existing questionnaires; piloting and field testing of draft questionnaires; consistency and validity checks. SETTING Four hospitals, in Coventry (two), Swindon, and Milton Keynes. PATIENTS 373 p...

OBJECTIVE The study measured the perceived value of an academic library's embedded librarian service model. SETTING The study took place at the health sciences campuses of a research institution. METHODS A web-based survey was distributed that asked respondents a series of questions about their utilization of and satisfaction with embedded librarians and services. RESULTS Over 58% of resp...