OBJECTIVES To describe the dimensions of childhood pedestrian and bicyclist injuries in Long Beach, California, and to identify risk factors for these injuries. POPULATION Long Beach residents aged 0-14 years who were involved in an auto versus pedestrian or bicyclist incident that resulted in a hospital visit and/or police response, between 1 September 1988 and 31 August 1990. METHODS Case...

BACKGROUND Adverse events are considered a major international problem related to the performance of health systems. Evaluating the occurrence of adverse events involves, as any other outcome measure, determining the extent to which the observed differences can be attributed to the patient's risk factors or to variations in the treatment process, and this in turn highlights the importance of me...

Control charts are one of the most important tools in statistical process control that lead to improve quality processes and ensure required quality levels. In traditional control charts, all data should be exactly known, whereas there are many quality characteristics that cannot be expressed in numerical scale, such as characteristics for appearance, softness, and color. Fuzzy sets theory is a...

Software inspections are an efficient way of controlling and reducing the number of faults throughout the software life cycle [Ebenau94a]. A process, more or less stable and formal, is used when inspecting a document and by using statistical quality control [Mills88] the software inspection process can be monitored. Further, an early warning system can be implemented into organisations which ca...

Cardiovascular (CV) risk prediction has a central role in primary CV prevention. Several risk charts have been developed in the attempt to identify subjects at risk who might benefit from more aggressive interventions. However, risk charts show main limitations and they remain underutilized in general practice. The addition of novel risk markers has substantially failed to improve risk charts d...

As part of the investigations into the crimes of Harold Shipman, it has become clear that there is little monitoring of deaths in general practice. By use of data on annual deaths at family physician and practice level for five English health authorities for 1993-99, we investigate whether cumulative sum charts (a type of statistical process control chart) could be used to create a workable mon...

• The Shewhart control charts, used for monitoring industrial processes, are the most popular tools in Statistical Process Control (SPC). They are usually developed under the assumption of independent and normally distributed data, an assumption rarely true in practice, and implemented with estimated control limits. But in general, we essentially want to control the process mean value and the p...