CONTEXT This study is part of the Methods of Assessing Response to Quality Improvement Strategies (MARQuIS) research project on cross-border care, investigating quality improvement strategies in healthcare systems across the European Union (EU). AIM To explore to what extent a sample of acute care European hospitals have implemented patient safety strategies and mechanisms and whether the imp...

We examine how adjustments to earnings during year-end audits affect measures of earnings quality. There are four key findings. First, audit adjustments cause earnings to become smoother and more persistent. Second, the adjustments result in higher accrual quality. Third, audit adjustments have a larger negative effect on signed accruals than absolute accruals. Fourth, the adjustments do not re...

Today's the clients of auditors use a variety of IT systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to process accounting transactions. These systems have brought about changes within the organizations. ERP systems developed a new audit landscape requiring auditors to adjust audit processes, controls, and tests. This paper examines how implementation of ERP changes audit process and quality ...

INTRODUCTION the Department of Health report 'Good practice in continence services' highlights the need for proper assessment and management of urinary incontinence. The National Service Framework for Older People required service providers to establish integrated continence services by April 2004. A national audit was conducted to assess the quality of continence care for older people and whet...

As progression-free survival (PFS) has become increasingly used as the primary endpoint in oncology phase III trials, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has generally required a complete-case blinded independent central review (BICR) of PFS to assess and reduce potential bias in the investigator or local site evaluation. However, recent publications and FDA analyses have shown a high c...

The co-evolution of pollinators and angiosperms has contributed to the remarkable diversity and success of bees and bee-pollinated plants (Harder & Johnson 2008). Many pollinated plants provide nectar or pollen rewards that encourage foragers to be faithful to the same floral species (Gegear & Burns 2007). These rewards can also lead to site constancy, in which foragers visit the same foraging ...

Empirical studies of earnings management, audit pricing, and audit reporting provide extensive evidence that the Big Five public accounting firms are associated with higher quality financial statements (Francis 2004). Nevertheless, the recent high-profile financial reporting failures that roiled the U.S. capital markets cast doubt on whether this proposition remains valid. Indeed, many commenta...

Background and aims: Quality of visit services is a decisive aspect of patient-physician communication that its inadequacy can negatively influence the diagnosis efficiency. The aim of this study was to survey visit quality at provincial level during plan of health sector evolution in Tabriz. Methods: A sample of 540 patients who referred to the outpatien...