BACKGROUND Building research capacity in health services has been recognised internationally as important in order to produce a sound evidence base for decision-making in policy and practice. Activities to increase research capacity for, within, and by practice include initiatives to support individuals and teams, organisations and networks. Little has been discussed or concluded about how to m...

Healthcare professionals require a unique knowledge base to function effectively during a hospital's response to a mass-casualty incident (MCI). A survey of 128 physicians, nurses, and emergency medical technicians involved in trauma care was conducted to assess their knowledge base and how it affected their decision-making in response to a MCI following a terrorist bombing. Three-quarters of t...

OBJECTIVES This study characterizes the nature, size, and knowledge gaps of the public health emergency preparedness (PHEP) literature. METHODS Systematic review of PHEP articles published in 10 relevant journals from 2000 through 2008 was conducted. An inclusion process and coding sheet was developed; articles were coded on the basis of abstract content for variables, including type of metho...

Clinical decisions must be made. Correct course of action may not be readily apparent. Multiple non-pharmacologic, pharmacologic, and device therapies are available. Reasonably valid methods exist to address knowledge base and evaluate medical evidence. Data beyond randomized clinical trials exist that enhance medical decision making. Uncertainties remain concerning approaches to treatment afte...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is working with selected state and local health departments, academic centers, and others to develop an environmental public health tracking initiative to improve geographic and temporal surveillance of environmental hazards, exposures, and related health outcomes. The objective is to support poli...

This paper considers issues related to farmers' control of program planning for non-formal agricultural adult education. Discussion is based on an empirical study of a $10 million Canadian sustainable agriculture education program that was initiated, created, and controlled by a coalition of farm organizations, supplanting a traditional role of extension. Theories of participatory extension edu...

BACKGROUND There remains a concern that Indigenous Australians have been over-researched without corresponding improvements in their health; this trend is applicable to most Indigenous populations globally. This debate article has a dual purpose: 1) to open a frank conversation about the value of research to Indigenous Australian populations; and 2) to stimulate ways of thinking about potential...

BACKGROUND Like many new fields, implementation science has become vulnerable to instrumentation issues that potentially threaten the strength of the developing knowledge base. For instance, many implementation studies report findings based on instruments that do not have established psychometric properties. This article aims to review six pressing instrumentation issues, discuss the impact of ...

Although some drivers with mild dementia may continue to drive after the condition has been diagnosed, the ability to drive a motor vehicle safely is eventually lost as the disease progresses. Clinicians involved in dementia care are often asked to make an assessment on whether a patient is fit to drive, even though they often lack basic knowledge and formal training in this area. The purpose o...

In this paper we define the class of consistent belief functions as the counterparts of consistent knowledge bases in classical logic. We prove that such class can be defined univocally no matter our definition of proposition implied by a belief function. As consistency can be desirable in decision making, the problem of transforming an arbitrary belief function into a consistent one arise, and...