We report here 14 cases of measles among healthcare workers (HCWs) in Public Hospitals of Marseilles, France that occurred between April and November 2010. All cases but one were under 30 years of age. Following the identification of these cases, we checked the immune status among 154 HCWs who volunteered to take part in the study and showed that 93% and 88% were immune against measles and mump...

Improving accountability in public services has been a central objective of many public sector reforms in recent years. Chief among these have been efforts to generate observable performance measures as a basis for monitoring performance. This paper examines a natural experiment in regimes applied to waiting list targets for hospital admissions in England and Wales. Prior to 2001, each country ...

In New South Wales (NSW), a new suite of nutrition standards for menus and specifications for therapeutic diets to be used in hospitals has been developed. These standards were required to facilitate centralised menu planning and food production, with the move to management of most hospital food services by HealthShare NSW, a state-wide business unit of NSW Health. The standards also aim to imp...

Delay in recognizing clinical deterioration in acutely unwell patients often leads to cardiac arrests and unexpected admissions to the Intensive Care Unit. Early Warning Scoring Systems based on vital physiological parameters help in early detection of clinical deterioration. When combined with a system of prompt and appropriate clinical response, they have been shown to improve outcome. A stan...

Demand for hospital inpatient care varies in a consistent way. However, a part of this variability is unpredictable. Hospitals react to this situation by holding standby capacity in order to be prepared to meet unanticipated surges in demand. This paper examines the production responses to unexpected hospital demand on a sample of Greek public hospitals over the period 2001-2005. The hospital o...

BACKGROUND Ineffective communication of hospital discharge instructions may have important implications for future health, function, and quality of life. OBJECTIVE To describe patient recall of predischarge communication of discharge instructions by hospital staff, and to demonstrate the feasibility a posthospitalization survey in this urban, public hospital population. METHODS Cross-sectio...

Shortly after the establishment of Hong Kong's Hospital Authority (HA) in 1990, ten library service networks supported by the Library Information Systems (HALIS) were established to pool resources. A survey was undertaken to investigate the information-seeking behavior of health professionals working in thirty-seven public hospitals, examine their information needs, assess user satisfaction wit...

This paper reports on some important findings of a study conducted in Covilhã/Portugal on appropriateness of hospital admission and in-hospital days in a Portuguese hospital using an adapted version of the Appropriateness Evaluation Protocol--a review tool for hospital utilization. This analysis showed a significant rate of inappropriateness in admission (24.6%) and days of stay (37.4%) and it ...

Admissions to Victorian public hospitals because of injury for the six years from July 1987 to June 1993 were analysed to ascertain the frequencies, rates and trends over time in rates. This information is important for epidemiological purposes, to determine priorities for injury prevention and, as baseline data, to monitor the success of interventions. The major causes of injury, and their rat...

The study investigates the additional payroll expense caused by absenteeism due to illness among nursing professionals and physicians at two public hospitals at Cacoal, Rondonia, Brazil. Non-programmed absences of up to 15 days which occurred at the hospital units between 2004 to 2007 were verified in the database of the institutions human resource sector. From 1,704 non-programmed absences, 1,...