background and objectives: patient satisfaction is an important indicator of the quality of health and healthcare services. most relevant studies in iran have been conducted in the nation’s capital, and there is a lack of large-scale studies in other regions of this country. in order to help filling this gap, this study was designed to undertake a relatively large-scale assessment of patient sa...

BACKGROUND The past fifteen years have been marked by large-scale change efforts undertaken by healthcare organizations to improve patient safety and patient-centered care. Despite substantial investment of effort and resources, many of these large-scale or "radical change" initiatives, like those in other industries, have enjoyed limited success - with practice and behavioural changes neither ...

how to instill compassion in a healthcare organization? in this article, i respond to marianna fotaki’s proposals in her piece, ‘why and how is compassion necessary to provide good quality healthcare?’ by drawing on insights from organization studies. following fotaki, i argue that to instill targets and formal measures for assessing compassion would be problematic. i conclude by drawing on psy...

Pierre-Gerlier Forest and his colleagues make a strong argument for the need to expand policy capacity among healthcare actors. In this commentary, I develop an additional argument in support of Forest et al view. Forest et al rightly point to the need to have embedded policy experts to successfully translate healthcare reform policy into healthcare change. Translation of externally generated i...

AIM This paper is a discussion of the derivation of the Nursing Services Delivery Theory from the application of open system theory to large-scale organizations. BACKGROUND The underlying mechanisms by which staffing indicators influence outcomes remain under-theorized and unmeasured, resulting in a 'black box' that masks the nature and organization of nursing work. Theory linking nursing wor...

Large organizations renew their core business software with some regularity, resulting in serious challenges for in-company training officers. Especially when large numbers of employees need to be trained to use updated software on short notice, traditional face-to-face training methods fall short. Contemporary elearning is regarded a solution for such short-term and large-scale training. This ...

Telemonitoring, a sub-category of telemedicine, is promoted as a solution to meet the challenges in Western healthcare systems in terms of an increasing population of people with chronic conditions and fragmentation issues. Recent findings from large-scale telemonitoring programs reveal that these promises are difficult to meet in complex real-life settings which may be explained by concentrati...

The extent of faith-based organizations' participation within the overall health systems of developing countries is unclear. Recent reports state that faith-based organizations play a substantial role in providing healthcare in developing countries, cited in some publications as up to 70% of all healthcare services. The data behind these numbers are sometimes difficult to pinpoint and seem at o...