Conclusions Quality assurance as such is mainly a question of attitudes and behaviour. It is difficult to induce doctors to modify their behaviour by pressures other than from inside the profession. In France there are three types of understanding of medical evaluation: that of the official bodies and evaluation units of hospitals, who try to define and disseminate actual quality assurance; tha...

In this paper, the authors present a new method for writing assurance cases. Assurance cases are documented bodies of evidence that provide a convincing and valid argument that a system is adequately dependable for a given application in a given environment. Assurance cases have been used mostly in the safety field, but are now beginning to be widely applied in other areas. Cyber security is on...

A case is made for greater emphasis to be placed on value chain management as an alternative to geographically based disease risk mitigation for trade in commodities and products derived from animals. The geographic approach is dependent upon achievement of freedom in countries or zones from infectious agents that cause so-called transboundary animal diseases, while value chain-based risk manag...

Software assurance is an important part of the software development process to reduce risks and ensure that the software is dependable and trustworthy. Software defects and weaknesses can often lead to software errors and failures and to exploitation by malicious users. Testing, certification and accreditation have been traditionally used in the software assurance process to attempt to improve ...

We extend continuous assurance research by proposing a novel continuous assurance architecture grounded in information fusion research. Existing continuous assurance architectures focus primarily on methods of monitoring assurance clients’ systems to detect anomalous activities and have not addressed the question of how to process the detected anomalies. Consequently, actual implementations of ...

Introduction: According to the American Society of Radiation Oncology, all patients receive radiation therapy during their illness, where radiation is delivered by the medical linear accelerator (Linac). The aim of this study was to evaluate the quality assurance (QA) of the Linac in analyzing the used dose profile in the treatment of cancer tumors. Materi...

Assurance has been defined as “the degree of confidence that security needs are satisfied”[2]. The problem with this definition is that, unless one has a way to specify security needs in some measurable way, assurance can not be expressed in a measurable way either. The definition leaves the practitioner with the challenge of determining what “security needs” are, whether or not they have been ...

Introduction Since 2003/04 the Department of Health (DH) has been progressively implementing a prospective payment casemix funding system, known as Payment by Results (PbR), so that in 2008/09 over 90 percent of acute inpatient activity is reimbursed through PbR. The accuracy of the data recorded for each episode of care can directly influence the accuracy of reimbursement between commissioners...

The focus of this article is quality assurance in nursing research. Due to well established problems regarding the education of nursing research and increasing pressure to take responsibility for the quality of all educational activities, departments of nursing are obliged to initiate actions to assure quality in nursing research. A nursing department functions within a well-defined external co...