Around the world, health and social care systems are struggling to cope with the increasing demands for services resulting from rapidly ageing populations with multiple physical, mental, and social care needs. The search for structural or technological solutions gives emphasis to the reorientation of care systems that need to prevent ill health, support self-care, deliver care closer to people’...

July 2006 Volume 32 Number 7 As documented in the Institute of Medicine’s two widely cited reports, health care has serious patient safety and quality problems. Care processes are poorly designed and characterized by unnecessary duplication of services and long waiting times and delays. As a result, health care is not meeting patients’ needs—and needs to be redesigned. In this article we descri...

The safety and acceptability of many widely used solid waste management practices are of serious concern from the public health point of view. Such concern stems from both distrust of policies and solutions proposed by all tiers of government for the management of solid waste and a perception that many solid waste management facilities use poor operating procedures. Waste management practice th...

We found that certain mid-range consumer-level digital single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras using full-frame complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensors outperform X-ray film in acquiring signals from immunoblots that use enhanced chemiluminescence for detection. These cameras exhibit a sensitivity comparable to X-ray film, yet they provide a 3-fold increase in linear dynamic range and s...

Introduction Chronic asymptomatic iridocyclitis occurs in 10-20% of all patients with JIA leading to insidious but progressive morbidity and possible blindness. Patients with JIA-associated uveitis need to be seen by an ophthalmologist regularly. Lean thinking is based upon the following principles 1) Identifying the customer value (value adding steps) and alleviating the redundant parts of the...

Millions of tons food from grocery stores go to waste every year in the US, while many people consistently depend on community banks. Having a plan transport surplus needy will eliminate both and hunger at same time. This problem is modeled as bipartite graph with one set vertices representing donors certain excess various types, other banks demand different types food, cost transportation each...

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a popular and easy tool for visualizing production processes in enterprise. It allows one to eliminate or reduce waste, i.e., activities that do not create added value the customer. The versatility of this it be used industry. There are theoretical, methodological, practical aspects encountered by practitioners developing specific manufacturing industry, but they f...

Waste is part of the agenda of the European Environment and Health Process and included among the topics of the Sixth Ministerial Conference on Environment and Health. Disposal and management of hazardous waste are worldwide challenges. We performed a systematic review to evaluate the evidence of the health impact of hazardous waste exposure, applying transparent and a priori defined methods. T...