OBJECTIVE This study is the first phase of a two-phase study aimed at exploring the perspectives of consumers with schizophrenia regarding quality of life and developing a quality-of-life assessment that addresses factors experienced as important by consumers. METHOD Focus groups were used to explore the perspectives of 35 persons with schizophrenia regarding the meaning of quality of life an...

BACKGROUND Research capacity is a prerequisite for any health care institution intending to provide high-quality care, yet, few clinicians engage in research, and their work is rarely recognized. To make research an institutional activity, it could be helpful to measure health care professionals' research performance. However, a comprehensive approach to do this is lacking. METHODS We conduct...

The assessment of healthcare quality increasingly emphasises lay acceptability, as evidenced by the emergence of patient satisfaction and patient-centred care in the literature and in policy. In this paper we aim to provide a conceptual overview of acceptability and propose ways to enhance its assessment. Firstly, we map how acceptability's importance in quality assessments has increased and ho...

Global wireless networks enable mobile users to communicate regardless of their locations. One of the most important issues is location management in a highly dynamic environment because mobile users may roam between different wireless systems, network operators, and geographical regions. In this paper, a location-tracking mechanism is introduced that consists of intersystem location updates an...

The Bluetooth technology is the convergence of Mobile Communication and Computing Applications. The Wireless Network era introduces the new generation appliances as an intelligent device, equipped with communication functionalities. Internet worms have become a challenging threat in Internet, in the mean way Bluetooth worm becomes a challenge for Bluetooth Wireless Personal Area Network. Even t...

In mate choice copying, a male is more likely to be chosen by other females simply by being observed mating. A recent finding is that women are influenced in their assessments of men by the phenotypic quality of males’ sexual partners. We recently proposed that the term ‘mate quality bias’ should be used to differentiate this phenomenon from ‘mate choice copying’. Here, under the guise of a dat...

The first evaluation of the Medical Insurance for a New Generation program (SMNG) was conducted in 2009. A mixed-method approach was used to obtain a comprehensive picture of SMNG members and the program itself. The evaluation comprised: 1) Program design; 2) Social and health conditions of its members; 3); Evaluation of SMNG's performance by measuring coverage, productivity and efficiency; 4) ...

The use of the term "quality of life" to encompass the values and perceptions of patients has created doubt, confusion, and misunderstanding among practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and patients. The principal reason for this state of affairs is that a clear conceptual basis for quality-of-life measures is lacking. In this article, the current rationale for quality-of-life measurement in...

Quality improvement (QI) efforts affect a broader range of people than we often assume. These are the potential stakeholders for QI and its evaluation, and they have valuable perspectives to offer when they are consulted in planning, conducting and interpreting evaluations. QI practitioners are accustomed to consulting stakeholders to assess unintended consequences or assess patient experiences...

Several problems arise among the existing LSB-based image steganographic schemes due to distortion in a stegoimage and limited payload capacity. Thus, a proposed scheme has been developed with the aims to help in improving the payload of the secret data at the same time retaining the quality of the stego-image produced within an acceptance threshold. This study has led to the modification of th...