INTRODUCTION The German healthcare system is facing ongoing radical change and development. The increasing tendency to urge hospitals and medical staff to work in a profit-oriented way constitute among other factors clear present and future challenges. Physicians and surgeons in particular increasingly complain of increasing stress attributed to measures aiming at cost reduction in hospitals. T...

BACKGROUND High performing hospitals attain excellence across multiple measures of performance and multiple departments. Studying high performing hospitals can be valuable if factors associated with high performance can be identified and applied. Factors leading to high performance are complex and an exclusive quantitative approach may fail to identify richly descriptive or relevant contextual ...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have identified medication errors in preparing and administering intravenous medicines of 13-84% in hospitals in individual countries. OBJECTIVE To compare the effect of the design and implementation of systems for the preparation and administration of intravenous therapy in hospitals in three European countries on the number of observed medication errors. To gain ...

Studies of hospital efficiency seldom lead to changes in practice, partly because recommendations are unspecific or results are not seen as robust. We describe a method to compare hospital costs that utilises patient-level data. We perform a two-stage analysis in which we first consider factors that explain costs among patients and then across hospital departments. We illustrate our approach by...

PURPOSE The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine developmental trends in healthcare organisation management practice and improvement work. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH Primary healthcare centre (n = 1,031) and clinical hospital department (n = 1,542) managers were surveyed in spring 2007 (response rate 46 per cent). This article compares results from this survey with a study in 2003...

Very little of WHO's work is done by the Organization alone. Much of it takes the form of coordination and collaboration in which WHO acts in partnership with governments, institutions-both governmental and nongovernmental-and individual scientists and other workers in the field of health. As the following article shows, collaboration with a university hospital department enriches both partners...

BACKGROUND Providing clinical pharmacy services in emergency departments (EDs) is important because adverse drug events commonly occur before, during, and after ED encounters. Survey studies in the United States have indicated a relatively low presence of clinical pharmacy services in the ED setting, but a descriptive survey specific to Canada has not yet been performed. OBJECTIVES To describ...

The field of skin biology is beautifully dynamic and growing rapidly. This expanding wave of new knowledge is transforming the clinical practice of Dermatology on a constant basis. Key to translating the new knowledge being acquired about skin disease is the conduit of skills and knowledge that can reliably move such discoveries through the maze of activities needed to bring change to clinical ...