Background As assisted reproductive technology is advancing, it should arrange all principles and indexes to improve its quality of functions to provide optimal services to infertile patients. There are few infertility care-specific quality indicators. The indicators were developed by the existing quality dimensions. Safety, effectiveness, and patient centeredness are the most important quality...

An innovative program jointly sponsored by members of the departments of obstetrics and urology and the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Michigan began in 2002. The Fertility Counseling and Gamete Cryopreservation Program (FCGCP) was created to provide counseling and education about therapy-induced infertility to newly diagnosed patients with cancer as well as facilitating the s...

INTRODUCTION The German healthcare system is facing ongoing radical change and development. The increasing tendency to urge hospitals and medical staff to work in a profit-oriented way constitute among other factors clear present and future challenges. Physicians and surgeons in particular increasingly complain of increasing stress attributed to measures aiming at cost reduction in hospitals. T...

BACKGROUND High performing hospitals attain excellence across multiple measures of performance and multiple departments. Studying high performing hospitals can be valuable if factors associated with high performance can be identified and applied. Factors leading to high performance are complex and an exclusive quantitative approach may fail to identify richly descriptive or relevant contextual ...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have identified medication errors in preparing and administering intravenous medicines of 13-84% in hospitals in individual countries. OBJECTIVE To compare the effect of the design and implementation of systems for the preparation and administration of intravenous therapy in hospitals in three European countries on the number of observed medication errors. To gain ...

Studies of hospital efficiency seldom lead to changes in practice, partly because recommendations are unspecific or results are not seen as robust. We describe a method to compare hospital costs that utilises patient-level data. We perform a two-stage analysis in which we first consider factors that explain costs among patients and then across hospital departments. We illustrate our approach by...

PURPOSE The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine developmental trends in healthcare organisation management practice and improvement work. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH Primary healthcare centre (n = 1,031) and clinical hospital department (n = 1,542) managers were surveyed in spring 2007 (response rate 46 per cent). This article compares results from this survey with a study in 2003...

Very little of WHO's work is done by the Organization alone. Much of it takes the form of coordination and collaboration in which WHO acts in partnership with governments, institutions-both governmental and nongovernmental-and individual scientists and other workers in the field of health. As the following article shows, collaboration with a university hospital department enriches both partners...

BACKGROUND Endometriosis is a common cause of infertility. Whereas celiac disease (CD) is present in ~1% of individuals in Western Europe, the prevalence in women undergoing investigation for infertility is often >2%. Still, the relationship between CD and endometriosis is unclear. METHODS We identified 11 097 women with CD (Marsh 3: villous atrophy) through biopsy data from all 28 pathology ...

Chlamydia trachomatis is the most prevalent infectious disease in the United States. Complications include pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), ectopic pregnancy, and infertility. The cost of PID in 1998 was estimated at greater than $1.9 billion. Screening intervention strategies are often consumed by those at low risk. The objective of this study is the development of a more cost-effective inte...