The government could fire and rehire consultants in order to move them on to a new contract, the BMA has said. Delegates at the BMA’s annual UK consultants’ conference in London on 3 March heard that this could be one option considered by the government if consultants rejected its final contract offer. The government has yet to announce a firm offer for changes, but Rob Harwood, the BMA Consult...

BACKGROUND Healthcare professionals must make decisions for patients based on ethical considerations. However, they rely on clinical ethics consultations (CEC) to review ethical justifications of their decisions. CEC consultants support the cases reviewed and guide medical care. When both healthcare professionals and CEC consultants face ethical problems in medical care, how is their judgment d...

OBJECTIVE To assess the impact on general practitioners and hospital consultants of hospital outpatient dispensing policies in England. DESIGN Postal questionnaire and telephone interview survey of general practitioners and hospital consultants in January 1991. SETTING 94 selected major acute hospitals in England. PARTICIPANTS 20 general practitioners in the vicinity of each of 94 selecte...

Objective: To evaluate inter-examiner variations in glaucoma management amongst consultants with different levels of experience in Virtual Glaucoma Clinic. Methods: Three glaucoma specialist consultants with varying years of experience (1, 5 and 15 years) independently reviewed 112 consecutive cases. The management outcomes of the three consultants were recorded for each case on a specially des...

It is difficult to measure medical staff workload and medical staff requirements in microbiology departments. A review of 14 job descriptions for consultant microbiologists showed that the number of hospital beds and the number of specimens are more reliable workload indices than the population figure. Ratios between beds or specimens and medical staff numbers may help to identify understaffed ...

Introduction A recent article in Elsevier, a Dutch magazine, says that managers involved in strategy making overestimate their possibilities to steer organisations (Crooijmans, 1998). In other terms, managers overestimate their agency, or their ability to make a difference (Giddens, 1984) in an organisation by making and implementing strategies. Then what should strategy consultants do if they ...

The use of technology consultants to assist in the implementation of complex information technology (IT) innovations has been the trend in the past several years. For some complex integrated software solutions, the consultants have become the largest cost component. This study examines the relative efficiency (success) of technology consultants in IT innovation implementation. Thirty-six firms ...

Applications Submission date: July 31, 2002 Word count: 6633 + (3 figures) * 250 words/figure = 7383 Michael Mahut, INRO Consultants, Inc., 5160 Decarie Blvd. Suite 610, Montreal H3X 2H9, Canada. Telephone: (514) 369-2023; fax: (514) 369-2026; e-mail: [email protected] Michael Florian, University of Montreal, P.O. box 6120, station centre-ville, Montreal H3C 3J7, Canada; and INRO Consultants, In...

OBJECTIVES The objectives of this study were to assess the work demands as potential stressors of health service consultants, and to describe the development of tools for measuring stress experiences of consultants. METHODS A stratified random sample of 500 NHS consultants in Scotland was targeted by a postal questionnaire and 375 (75%) returned a valid response. They completed questionnaires...

The recent technological advancement has proved to be tremendously helpful for medical consultants. However, this advancement has also generated an enormous volume and variety of data, with a high velocity causing an information load for the medical consultants. Information overload can be defined as a difficulty a person can have in comprehending issue and making judgments that are caused by t...