Background: After a Ministry of Health conference on outcome analysis, a study was proposed to explore the value of incorporating patientreported outcome measures into the daily activity of a surgical office. Methods: Subjective survey and objective clinical testing methods were used. Patients undergoing hip or knee total joint replacement at a nonacademic centre were asked to complete outcome ...

Book Reviews J. G. Sinkovics Medical Oncology – an Advanced Course A Self-Assessment Guide for Subspecialty Board Examinations and Practice Dekker, New York 1979. 679 pp.; sFr. 100.-ISBN 0-8247-6863-9 The author of this book is Professor of Medicine at the University of Texas System Cancer Center. His broad teaching experience enabled him to write a textbook for fellows and residents preparing ...

The origins The use of quality management tools and systems, for a long time confined to the private sector, has since the early 1990s started to pervade the public sector in Europe as part of its strive for modernisation, better public management, increased performance and a stronger “customer” focus. In the course of the last decade, various quality management tools and systems started to be ...

“Towards Software Excellence” (TSE) is a web-based process assessment facility established by the UK’s National Computing Centre (NCC). TSE provides software developers with a simple and easy-to-use means of self-assessing the capability of their development processes. They can understand the “good practice” expected by TSE, compare their processes against TSE’s process model, identify their "s...

Mental process and mental experience are not the same thing. The former is the operation of the mind; the latter is the subjective life that emerges from that operation. In social evaluation, implicit and explicit attitudes express this distinction. Although it is clear that they are not the same, how they differ is not. Across content domains, implicit and explicit attitude measures show subst...

Three independent studies examine the impact of obesity on rheumatoid arthritis (RA), either as a risk factor for the development of disease or as a prognostic factor for the severity of disease. Interestingly, these studies have investigated the role of obesity at different stages of the disease, ranging from the ‘preclinical phase’, to the early RA period, to the established disease stage. Th...

This study investigates whether replays of records of eye movements made during the task performance process, can be a useful cue for self-assessment, and it aims to uncover which aspects of their performance participants at different levels of expertise consider when they are asked to engage in self-assessment while thinking aloud.The present study suggests that at least for somewhat advanced ...

of the ethos of a physician. So why did we feel so threatened when the process was formalised under the title of Continuing Professional Development (CPD)? Was it a fear of the unknown, the sheer burden (boredom perhaps?) of documenting one’s daily educational activities? Or was it the fact that many of us felt that there was no evidence that this documentation would lead to an overall improvem...

As volunteers within various pharmacy organizations, we have become more sensitized to the crucial role of language in communicating desired messages. For example, the term community pharmacy is now preferred over retail pharmacy. At no time is messaging more crucial than during times of change. The academy is facing changes in the practice/health care environment, updates to Accreditation Coun...

The first eight papers accepted for the Special Issue on “Emerging Trends in Education” were published previously [1]. Here, we introduces the remaining eight papers, which cover quite a varied set of topics, encompassing online education, adaptive learning, student modeling and analytics, as well as gamification. For example, in “FORGE toolkit: leveraging distributed systems in eLearning platf...