The field of occupational therapy, as with all facets of health care, has been profoundly affected by the changing climate of health care delivery. The combination of cost-effectiveness and quality of care has become the benchmark for and consequent drive behind the rise of managed health care delivery systems. The spawning of outcomes research is in direct response to the need for comparative ...

Background 5S is a lean method for workplace organization; it is an abbreviation representing five Japanese words that can be translated as sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain. The 5S management method has been recognized recently as a potential solution for improving the quality of government healthcare services in low- and middle-income countries. Objective To assess how the 5...

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) stands out as the intriguing wild card of health care reform. CER compares competing treatments against each other to determine which interventions work best, supplying critical information for medical decisionmaking and health policy. If CER works as planned, it may be one of the few reform measures in the final health care legislation that could flatte...

We study the effects of labor intensive health care within a research and development (R&D) driven growth model with overlapping generations. Health care increases longevity, labor participation, and productivity, while it also diverts labor away from production and R&D. We examine under which conditions expanding health care enhances growth and welfare and establish mild conditions under which...

To discover ways that the biomedical research community can foster the public's trust essential to sustain the research enterprise, in 2005 the authors and their colleagues convened a group of national leaders from sectors outside of academic science and health care that are also dependent on the public's trust. These leaders provided information about what their sectors do to earn the public's...

BACKGROUND Qualitative synthesis has become more commonplace in recent years. Meta-ethnography is one of several methods for synthesising qualitative research and is being used increasingly within health care research. However, many aspects of the steps in the process remain ill-defined. DISCUSSION We utilized the seven stages of the synthesis process to synthesise qualitative research on adh...

Considering the nature of qualitative studies, the interaction between researchers and participants can be ethically challenging for the former, as they are personally involved in different stages of the study. Therefore, formulation of specific ethical guidelines in this respect seems to be essential. The present paper aimed to discuss the necessity to develop explicit guidelines for conductin...

Given the demand for evidence-based practice (EBP) in health care and, more recently, in research fields, for applied research and for translation of generated knowledge into practice, finding a means to link research with practice is now essential. One approach is to create networks of health care providers who are prepared to be involved in research, particularly by providing information abou...

The emphasis on systematic methods of demonstrating accountability in health care is affecting the delivery of human services at all levels, from hospitals and community centers to individual private practitioners. New procedures are being proposed to meet the accountability demands encountered by therapists. Several recently developed methods for documenting clinical change in patient status a...

Qualitative research can make a valuable contribution to the study of quality and safety in health care. Sound ways of appraising qualitative research are needed, but currently there are many different proposals with few signs of an emerging consensus. One problem has been the tendency to treat qualitative research as a unified field. We distinguish universal features of quality from those spec...