Charles Hastings created the Association at a time when the country was in a state of flux, both political and social. The year 1832 saw the passage of the Great Reform Bill and the Anatomy Act, the foundation of the first provincial university in Durham, and the operation of the first passenger railways. Medical practice was still not fully recognised as a profession and doctors tended to join...

Medicine is becoming increasingly protocol driven. This provides a standardised format for doctors to deliver best practice, especially in the acute setting. 40 junior doctors were asked to locate three Trust guidelines: venous thromboembolism (VTE) prophylaxis; antibiotic prescribing; and management of upper gastrointestinal bleed (UGIB). For each doctor the time taken and number of mouse clic...

Knowledge management is considered as an important factor in improving health care services. KM facilitates the transfer of existing knowledge and the development of new knowledge in hospitals. This paper reviews practices adopted by doctors in Kuwait for capturing, sharing, and generating knowledge. It also discusses the perceived impact of KM practices on performance of hospitals. Based on a ...

Doctors and clients sometimes experience interactive clashes during hospital meetings in South-western Nigerian hospitals because of their divergent culture-constrained orientation to politeness cues. The goal of this paper is to unpack the discursive elements that characterize interactive confluence and divergence in selected consultative encounters in the hospitals. The findings indicate that...

 Background and Objectives: Hospital bed utilization is influenced by various factors, which may be categorized into patient-related, physician-related, and administration-related issues. It could be argued that the causes of inappropriate hospital bed utilization would be perceived differently by the clinicians and the patients. Given the unique role of clinical practitioners in quality of car...

In service sector, there are challenges in keeping an optimum balance between customers' demand and availability of resources. This problem is going to be more intense in the health sector due to the fact that both arrival and service times are random. Therefore, designing the service environment by keeping the optimum balance between customers’ demand and available resources is becoming a seri...

OBJECTIVE To study the local medical profession's opinions on the training requirements for the specialty of family medicine. This was to serve as a reference for future planning of the health care system. DESIGN Cross-sectional study. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING All registered doctors in Hong Kong. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Doctors' ratings on the importance of vocational training, professional...

The UK chief medical officer's recommendations for the re-licensing and performance management of doctors will mean a move from a formative towards a summative role for appraisal and its adjunct, the personal development plan. Where does this leave medical educators trying to promote reflective learning? It is taken for granted that self-directed learning is the sine qua non of all adult learni...

Editor—Doctors and managers obviously need to work together. To have two powerful groups not working together is likely to frustrate the efforts of both and to damage the service offered to patients. Why then is the relationship between doctors and managers often strained and currently perceived to be at a low ebb? Why is it that two groups, both protesting a desire to put patients at the centr...