this study was based on the hypothesis that “ecotourism is an important instrument in sustainable rural development and ecologically-based landscape planning approaches which take the objectives of socio-economic development and nature conservation have an effective role in this issue”. for this purpose, the necessity of ecologically-based landscape planning approaches in the planning and imple...

Same-day appointment requests are common and can be problematic for general practices that run appointment systems. In a questionnaire survey sent to 90 general practices in one health authority area (response rate 88%), a variety of management systems existed for dealing with same-day appointment requests. Managing the requests was found to be a significant cause of stress for many general pra...

BACKGROUND The issue of missed appointments in primary care is important for patients and staff. Little is known about how missed appointments, and the people who miss them, are managed in primary care, or about effective strategies for managing missed appointments. AIMS To understand the perceptions of primary care staff as to why patients miss appointments, to determine how these perception...

An outpatient department in which non-urgent patients arrived for consultation faces with the problem of patients’ long waiting time. Lack of an effective appointment is considered as the cause. In this study, a discrete event simulation model was developed to evaluate an appointment system. The developed system considered appointment rule, sequencing rule and environmental factor (priority rul...

Objective. To test if appointment reminders blinded to immunization status improve kept-appointment and vaccination coverage rates. Design. Controlled trial. Setting. Pediatric clinic serving a low-income community in New York City. Intervention. Children ages 4 through 18 months (n 5 1273) scheduled sequentially for clinic appointments were systematically assigned to 1 of 4 study groups: contr...

This paper describes a French Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) named NASTIA (Negotiating Appointment SeTting InterfAce). Appointment scheduling is a hybrid task halfway between slot-filling and negotiation. NASTIA implements three different negotiation strategies. These strategies were tested on 1734 dialogues with 385 users who interacted at most 5 times with the SDS and gave a rating on a scale o...