Local health departments (LHDs) are immersed in a changing environment with the economic and political pressures, competing public health priorities, and new and emerging public health issues. The need to achieve efficiencies and other improvements with the limited resources available has magnified, increasing the importance of performance management, and specifically quality improvement (QI). ...

The principal aim of this study is to determine the direct, indirect and total effect of critical soft factors (CSF) on quality improvement (QI) and organizational performance (OP) in 255 Malaysian electrical & electronics (E&E) firms. Based on previous empirical studies and theoretical considerations, a model is proposed linking the CSF and QI to organizational performance (OP). Previous resea...

Depression is a prevalent mental illness in developed countries. In Western medicine, experimental and clinical investigations have demonstrated that depression is associated with the dysregulation of neurotransmitter signaling, and symptoms of depression can be alleviated by therapeutic intervention. However, patients taking antidepressant drugs often experience serious side effects and high r...

OBJECTIVES The American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) Maintenance of Certification (MOC) program requires every ABEM-certified physician to attest to participating in a quality improvement (QI) activity every 5 years. Understanding the type and frequency of these QI activities could inform the emergency medicine community about the variety of QI activities in which emergency physicians (EP...

Formal quality-improvement (QI) projects require that participants are educated in QI methods to provide them with the capability to carry out successful, meaningful work. However, orchestrating a portfolio of projects that addresses the strategic mission of the institution requires an extension of basic QI training to provide the division or business unit with the capacity to successfully deve...

INTRODUCTION Studies of adult patient populations suggest that organizational culture is associated with quality improvement (QI) implementation, as well as patient outcomes. However, very little research on organizational culture has been performed in neonatal patient populations. METHOD This combined cross-sectional survey and retrospective cohort study assessed employee perceptions of orga...

We present a determination of the pion-nucleon (πN) σ term σ_{πN} based on the Cheng-Dashen low-energy theorem (LET), taking advantage of the recent high-precision data from pionic atoms to pin down the πN scattering lengths as well as of constraints from analyticity, unitarity, and crossing symmetry in the form of Roy-Steiner equations to perform the extrapolation to the Cheng-Dashen point in ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate a strategy for supporting nurses to work with quality improvement (QI). DESIGN Post-intervention evaluation. Study participants and intervention: 240 nurses participated in a uniformly designed 4 day basic training course in applying a model for QI. Of these, 156 nurses from over 50 healthcare institutions constituted the generic education (GE) group while 84 nurses from...

CONTEXT Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide, but treatment rates are low, particularly for minority patients. OBJECTIVE To estimated societal cost-effectiveness of two interventions to improve care for depression in primary care, examining Latino and white patients separately. METHODS Intent-to-treat analysis of data from a group-level controlled trial, in which matched pr...

CONTEXT Care of patients with depression in managed primary care settings often fails to meet guideline standards, but the long-term impact of quality improvement (QI) programs for depression care in such settings is unknown. OBJECTIVE To determine if QI programs in managed care practices for depressed primary care patients improve quality of care, health outcomes, and employment. DESIGN Ra...