Most healthcare organisations are service-oriented, fundamentally centred on critical services provided by medical and nursing staff. Increasingly, these human-centric services rely on softwareintensive systems, i.e. medical devices and health informatics, for improving different aspects of healthcare, e.g. enhancing efficiency through automation and patient safety through smart alarm systems. ...

The paper summarises previous theories of accident causation, human error, foresight, resilience and system migration. Five lessons from these theories are used as the foundation for a new model which describes how patient safety emerges in complex systems like healthcare: the System Evolution Erosion and Enhancement model. It is concluded that to improve patient safety, healthcare organisation...

Clinical guidelines (CG) contain general descriptions, defined by health care organisations, of the way in which a particular pathology should be treated. Their adoption in daily care offers several benefits to both patients and practitioners, such as the standardisation of the delivered care and the reduction of errors, but, at the same time, there are several issues that limit their applicati...

Objective. To investigate if an accreditation program facilitates healthcare organisations (HCOs) to evolve and maintain high performance human resource management (HRM) systems. Design. Cross sectional multi-method study. Setting and participants. Healthcare organisations participating in the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards Evaluation and Quality Improvement Program (EQuIP) between ...

BACKGROUND Australia has high rates of teenage pregnancy compared with many Western countries. Long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) offers an effective method to help decrease unintended pregnancies; however, current uptake remains low. The aim of this study was to investigate barriers to LARC use by young women in Australia. METHODS Healthcare professionals were recruited through publ...

Many countries are turning their attention to the use of explicit financial incentives to drive desired improvements in healthcare performance. However, we have only a weak evidence-base to inform policy in this area. The research challenge is to generate robust evidence on what financial incentives work, under what circumstances, for whom and with what intended and unintended consequences.

BACKGROUND In the United Kingdom, non-medical prescribing (NMP) has been identified as one way to improve healthcare quality and efficiency. Healthcare organisations are charged with overseeing the clinical governance of NMP and guidance recommends the identification of a lead director to be responsible for its implementation. While over twelve million items are prescribed each year by the 50,0...

Research that is integral into a 'learning healthcare system' can promote cost effective services and knowledge creation. As such, research is defined as a 'core function' in UK health service organisations, and is often planned through research and development (R&D) strategies that aim to promote research activity and research capacity development (RCD). The discussion focuses around the conte...

The study of IT adoption is a recurrent topic in IS research. In the healthcare sector and hospitals, the adoption of IT is predominantly justified by the desire to prevent medical errors and increase patients’ safety (Menachemi et al., 2007). However, researchers such as Mc Kee and Healy (2002) have observed that hospital reorganisations have received far less attention from researchers in Eur...

Healthcare-associated infections are a major concern to patients and the public as a result of both high rates of infection across the National Health Service (NHS), and media coverage of outbreaks at individual hospitals. The government has put in place a range of policies designed to reduce healthcare-associated infections in NHS organisations in England (with a similar priority being given i...