Despite extensive growth in recent years, the field of "quality-of-life" appraisal still evokes debate about basic perception of the concept and is accompanied by a plethora of indexes for measurement. One prime reason for the problems is that the measurements have been transferred from two separate sources - medical health status indexes and social-science population indexes - neither of which...

In healthcare settings, indicators are useful tools to assess the structure, process and outcomes of care. Moreover, when used to report to the public, indicators ensure greater transparency for our healthcare system. The purpose of this study was to identify in acute care settings three medication safety indicators that are suitable for public reporting in Ontario. A multi-phase process was de...

BACKGROUND Aspects of oral health related quality of life (OHRQoL) attracted an increased attention recently. OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to assess self-reported oral health related quality of life (OHRQoL) among patients requiring prosthetic rehabilitation and to determine the rate of improvement 1 month and 6-12 months after therapy. In addition, effect of age, gender, oral health in...

More and more of the information on the web is dialogic, from Facebook newsfeeds, to forum conversations, to comment threads on news articles. In contrast to traditional, monologic Natural Language Processing resources such as news, highly social dialogue is frequent in social media, making it a challenging context for NLP. This paper tests a bootstrapping method, originally proposed in a monol...

Considerable attention has been devoted to environmental assessment and monitoring, primarily by physical and biological scientists, and more recently by social scientists. However, population growth and global change have resulted in an imperative to assess the resiliency of the environment to adapt to large scale changes and to continue to produce goods and services for future generations (su...

Purpose Decision-makers, practitioners and community members have a need to assess the disaster resilience of their communities understand own capacities in situations. There is lack consensus among researchers as what means how it can be measured. This paper proposes novel technique achieve stakeholders on definitions, objectives indicators for measuring key dimension (CDR), physical infrastru...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To assess the impact of a breast clinic on a specific target population and evaluate early diagnosis performance indicators for breast cancer in the presence of a self referral policy. DESIGN Women living in Florence between 1980 and 1989 who had undergone mammography at a self referral breast clinic were studied. Main outcome measures were the use of mammography in relation t...