RATIONALE The Brisbane Cardiac Consortium, a quality improvement collaboration of clinicians from three hospitals and five divisions of general practice, developed and reported clinical indicators as measures of the quality of care received by patients with acute coronary syndromes or congestive heart failure. DEVELOPMENT OF INDICATORS An expert panel derived indicators that measured gaps bet...

The Victorian Department of Human Services has developed a classification and funding model for non-admitted radiation oncology patients. Agencies were previously funded on an historical cost input basis. For 1996-97, payments were made according to the new Non-admitted Radiation Oncology Classification System and include four key components. Fixed grants are based on Weighted Radiation Therapy...

BACKGROUND In an attempt to reduce the burden of influenza-like illness (ILI) on health resources, the Italian Ministry of Health released clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) on ILI management that include specific indications for the admission of children to the hospital. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether application of these CPGs reduced the rate of inappropriate hospital admissio...

SINCE thiouracil was introduced to clinical therapeutics in I943, antithyroid treatment for thyrotoxicosis has widely increased and proved more and more effective as the years have passed, partly as the result of experience but also through the use of more effective agents, such as carbimazole and methimazole. It is thus possible now to assess their relative value in comparison with surgical tr...

OBJECTIVE To determine the incremental cost-effectiveness of a clinical practice guideline (CPG) compared with "usual care" for treatment of perforated appendicitis in children. Secondary objective was to compare cost analyses using hospital accounting system data versus data in the Pediatric Health Information System (PHIS). BACKGROUND Value-based surgical care (outcomes relative to costs) i...

BACKGROUND While improvements in nursing practice environments are considered essential to address the nursing shortage, relatively little is known about the nursing practice environments in most hospitals. OBJECTIVES The objectives of this study are to describe variations in nursing practice environments across hospitals and to examine their associations to hospital bed size, community size,...

BACKGROUND Physician dual practice, a combination of public and private practice, has attracted attention due to fear of reduced work supply and a lack of key personnel in the public system, increase in low priority treatments, and conflicts of interest for physicians who may be competing for their own patients when working for private suppliers. In this article, we analyze both choice of dual ...

Fifty-seven HIV positive adults (mostly injecting drug users) attending two inner city Dublin general practices were followed for one year to identify the general practice and hospital components of their care. Many patients had advanced disease; during the year 10/57 (17.5%) died. The group made a median of seven visits to general practice (range 0-35) and two visits to hospital HIV clinics (r...

Background: Rooming-in, motivated by World Health Organization (WHO) strategies and baby-friendly hospital policies, is a practice followed in many maternity hospitals of Iran. Mother-infant dyad may easily be damaged by the separation caused by medical and surgical problems, which result in hospital stay. Regarding this, the aim of this study was to investigate the effects of the rooming-in pr...

hospitals have a long history throughout the history of medicine. first hospitals are originated from persia in ancient times in the sassanid dynasty (2nd to 6th century ad). after the advent of islam in persia (iran) in 637 ad, medical knowledge and also hospitals were ourished and advanced by persian scholars. shiraz azodi hospital and university was one of the important hospitals in persia....