Best Practice Statements (BPS) are designed to facilitate evidence-based practice. This descriptive, exploratory study evaluated the impact of five of these statements in Scotland. A postal survey of 1,278 registered nurses was undertaken to determine use of these statements and their perceived benefits (response rate: 42%). Use of the BPS differed across clinical sites and some statements were...

BACKGROUND According to the existential philosophers, meaning, purpose and choice are necessary for quality of life. Qualitative researchers exploring the perspectives of people who have experienced health crises have also identified the need for meaning, purpose and choice following life disruptions. Although espousing the importance of meaning in occupation, occupational therapy theory has be...

A stochastic model of the resistive switching mechanism in bipolar oxide-based resistive random access memory (RRAM) is presented. The distribution of electron occupation probabilities obtained is in agreement with previous work. In particular, a low occupation region is formed near the cathode. Our simulations of the temperature dependence of the electron occupation probability near the anode ...

AIM To examine, using a retrospective narrative study, the factors influencing four older people's decision to plan for the activities they would undertake once retired, the planning process undertaken and their subsequent experience of retirement. METHOD Semi-structured interviews were conducted to examine the factors influencing older people's decision to commence pre-retirement planning, t...

Service delivery processes play a key role in the competitiveness of modern organizations. Their effectiveness and efficiency are a consequence of successful design of new processes and improvement of existing processes. Improvement methodologies commonly focus on generic steps serving as a road map for moving a process from its current state along a guided path to better performance. However, ...

BACKGROUND Historically there has been a wide variation in the proportion of inadequate smears between general practices. Cervical screening in the UK is undergoing a fundamental change by moving from conventional to liquid based cytology (LBC). The main driver for this change has been a predicted reduction in the proportions of inadequate samples. This study investigates the effect of LBC on t...

2010 Özek. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons-AttributionNoncommercial-Share Alike License 2.5 Canada (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ca/ ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial purposes, and, if transformed, the re...

This paper presents a new approach for business processes redesign (BPR). The approach uses case-based reasoning techniques to model past business redesign into a case or stories based on a developed BPR framework and best practices rules. The resulting case base of past failing or successful experiences will be used to support business process designer and practitioner in redesigning or improv...

  Background :Evidence-based practice (EBP) provides nurses a method to use critically appraised and scientifically proven evidence for delivering quality health care and the best decision that leads to quality outcomes. The purpose of this study was to measure the practice, attitude and knowledge/skill of evidence-based practice of nurses in a teaching hospital in Iran.   Methods : This cross-...