The debate in the Lords on the Hospital Service, held on April 26th roved over a wide field but the mental health service had its full share of attention. Lord Stonham, who had initiated the debate, referred to the "disastrous speech" made by the Minister at the Annual Conference ?f the National Association for Mental Health and the forecast that in fifteen years only half the present number of...

OBJECTIVES To develop a tool which can easily access the hospital information system (HIS) to facilitate outpatient care and maximize patient satisfaction on his or her hospital visit. METHODS Our Center for Informatics developed an outpatient guidance system (OGS) after careful analysis of the list of daily tasks undergone by patients and related work processes. Bluetooth beacons were instal...

In July 2003, Premier, Inc. and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) launched the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration Project (HQI), a three-year program designed to determine if financial incentives are effective at improving the quality of inpatient care. In the demonstration, CMS will measure performance and pay incentives to participating hospitals that achieve superior...

INTRODUCTION The Chinese New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) was launched in 2003 aiming at protecting the poor in rural areas from high health expenditures and improving access to health services. The income related inequality of the reform is a debating and concerning policy issue in China. The purpose of this study is to analyze the degree and changes of income related inequalities in both...

BACKGROUND Crisis Resolution Teams (CRTs) aim to offer an alternative to hospital admission during mental health crises, providing rapid assessment, home treatment, and facilitation of early discharge from hospital. CRTs were implemented nationally in England following the NHS Plan of 2000. Single centre studies suggest CRTs can reduce hospital admissions and increase service users' satisfactio...

BACKGROUND In 2003 Ghana introduced a social health insurance scheme which resulted in the separation of purchasing of health services by the health insurance authority on the one hand and the provision of health services by hospitals at the other side of the spectrum. This separation has a lot of implications for managing accredited hospitals. This paper examines whether decoupling purchasing ...

OBJECTIVES Pre-hospital care (PH) in Brazil is currently in the phase of implementation and expansion, and there are few studies on the impacts of this public health service. The purpose of this study is to assess the quality of care and severity of trauma among the population served, using trauma scores, attendance response times, and mortality rates. This work compares two pre-hospital system...

tUre f0ne-eighth of the total expendiand \v i e health services for England hetw 's 011 psychiatric patients; by 1 1961 and 1963 these costs rose ~~r^~-4^but stayed in line with N.H.S. increases as a whole. If we look at the proportions of the cost of psychiatric illness borne by different services, that of hospital treatment fell from 84% to 82% in these years, while the share of local authori...

BACKGROUND Although mutual support and self-help groups based on shared experience play a large part in recovery, the employment of peer support workers (PSWs) in mental health services is a recent development. However, peer support has been implemented outside the UK and is showing great promise in facilitating recovery. AIMS This article aims to review the literature on PSWs employed in men...

On 16 December 2016, Vanessa Cameron retires as Chief Executive of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She started working there in September 1980 and in 1984 she became Secretary of the College, the role that preceded chief executive. The College was formed in 1971, so Vanessa has been present for most of its lifetime. It has been a period of continuous change that has seen psychiatry leave th...