BACKGROUND There is growing recognition of patients' contributions to setting objectives for their own care, improving health outcomes and evaluating care. OBJECTIVE To quantify the extent to which European hospitals have implemented strategies to promote a patient-centred approach, and to assess whether these strategies are associated with hospital characteristics and the development of the ...

BACKGROUND The gathering of feedback on doctors from patients after consultations is an important part of patient involvement and participation. This study first assesses the 23-item Patient Feedback Questionnaire (PFQ) designed by the Picker Institute, Europe, to determine whether these items form a single latent trait. Then, an Internet module with visual representation is developed to gather...

In a general practice with an existing patient participation group, a survey of patients was undertaken to ascertain knowledge of and interest in the group. It was hoped that this might avoid the failure that had befallen other groups of this type. Analysis of the questionnaire provided useful information: there was interest in the group, with a potential attendance of almost three-quarters of ...

Objective To elicit patient stakeholders' experience and perspectives about patient-centred care. Design Qualitative. Setting A large urban healthcare system. Participants Four patient stakeholders who are prostate cancer survivors. Main outcome measures Experience and perspectives of patient stakeholders regarding patient-centred care and treatment decisions. Results Our patient stak...

We appropriate Rogoff’s (Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context, 1991; in: Wertsch et al. (eds.) Sociocultural studies of mind, 1993) notion of guided participation to demonstrate, through abbreviated case studies, our strategy for integrating mobile technology-based learning experiences in higher education. Guided participation implies facilitating access to shared...

Rational choice when preferences are not required to be transitive and complete has been discussed in the literature for years. In this article transitivity and completeness of the preference relation is also not assumed. It will be shown that nevertheless the existence of a competitive equilibrium can be proven when those properties are replaced by a domination property which allows that there...

We present a comprehensive study of the use of value precedence constraints to break value symmetry. We first give a simple encoding of value precedence into ternary constraints that is both efficient and effective at breaking symmetry. We then extend value precedence to deal with a number of generalizations like wreath value and partial interchangeability. We also show that value precedence is...

Covering arrays have been studied for their applications to drug screening and software and hardware testing. In this paper, we model the problem as a constraint program. Our proposed models exploit non-binary (global) constraints, redundant modelling, channelling constraints, and symmetry breaking constraints. Our initial experiments show that with our best integrated model, we are able to eit...

Quark-meson duality for two-point functions of vector and axial-vector QCD currents is investigated in the large-Nc approximation. We find that the joint constraints of duality and chiral symmetry imply degeneracy of excited vector and axial-vector mesons in the large-Nc limit. We compare model-independent constraints with expectations based on the VenezianoLovelace-Shapiro string model. Severa...