The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of organizational self-assessment as a tool to enhance organizational capacity in nonprofit human service agencies when it is performed as part of an accreditation process. Eighty-eight organizations completed a self-assessment pretest designed to measure capacity at the beginning of an accreditation process and then the same self-assessment ...

Automatic and semi-automatic bloodpressure meters are simple-to-use thus widespread in home health monitoring. However, their results are not accurate and reproducible enough, the reliability of self-assessment is not satisfactory, medical doctors have reservations for the results. The occlusion by the cuff – applied in the majority of indirect bloodpressure meters changes the biomechanical pro...

Priority setting for the evaluation of health technologies in the Netherlands is exclusively based on the scientific merits of individual research proposals. This process has not resulted in satisfactory allocation of resources. Therefore, societal criteria for setting priorities for health technology assessment have been proposed as an adjunct to scientific criteria. These societal criteria in...

Meta-analyses are used to synthesize treatment information through application of statistical methods during all phases of clinical research and development, especially in the context of health technology assessment of the relative effectiveness between two treatments across trials as well as in drug reimbursement applications.1 The consistency of the treatment effect between groups of trials c...

There seems to be a general agreement amongst practitioners of economic evaluations, including Health Technology Assessment, that the explicit statement of a perspective is a necessary element in designing and reporting research. Moreover, there seems also to be a general presumption that the ideal perspective is “societal”. In this paper we endorse the first principle but dissent from the seco...

Richard Harrison University of Kansas Abstract: The fundamental feature that distinguishes positive behavior support (PBS) from previous generations of applied behavior analysis is its focus on the remediation of deficient contexts that are determined to be the source of the problem. Determining this source involves conducting a functional assessment. This innovative practices article presents ...

Chronic noncancer pain is a prevalent problem associated with poor quality of life. While symptom burden is frequently mentioned in the literature and clinical settings, this research highlights the considerable negative impact of chronic pain on the individual. The 15D, a measure of health-related quality of life (HRQOL), is a user-friendly tool with good psychometric properties. Using a modif...

The need to progress and innovate in health technology assessment (HTA) is a must in a continuously changing environment. The HTAi Policy Forum reflected on two specific areas for development where it was thought there was need for careful consideration and deliberation during the main annual meeting in February 2016. The study by Husereau et al. (1) in this journal presents the discussions res...

Maintenance of professional competence is a critical component of professionalism. However, traditional methods, which rely on individual self assessment, are inadequate. Conversely, legislated recertification programmes are difficult to individualise and can be perceived as draconian. What is required are better methods of standardised individual needs assessment. We suggest some possible stra...

This paper reports the findings of a two-year research project focused on developing students’ understanding of assessment criteria and the assessment process through a structured intervention involving both tacit and explicit knowledge transfer methods. The nature of the intervention is explained in detail, and the outcomes are analysed and discussed. The conclusions drawn from the evidence ar...