INTRODUCTION There is a limited body of research in the field of healthcare improvement science (HIS). Quality improvement and 'change making' should become an intrinsic part of everyone's job, every day in all parts of the healthcare system. The lack of theoretical grounding may partly explain the minimal transfer of health research into health policy. METHODS This article seeks to present t...

OBJECTIVE The article gives an introductory overview of the use of the Delphi expert consensus method in mental health research. It explains the rationale for using the method, examines the range of uses to which it has been put in mental health research, and describes the stages of carrying out a Delphi study using examples from the literature. METHOD To ascertain the range of uses, a system...

* This work has been partially supported by the Spanish CICYT under grant TIC97-0897-C04-03 Abstract The goal of a parallel program is stated as to reduce the execution time regarding the fastest sequential program solving the same problem. Parallel programming is growing due to the widespread use of network of workstations in high performance computing. MPI has become the standard for implemen...

Delivery of the Delphi online Each round of the Delphi was delivered online using a bespoke system that managed participation invitations , reminders, data collection and reporting. Integration of clinical and patient views Results of the separate Delphi surveys for each stakeholder group will be shared with all participants with an opportunity to re-score. Clinicians, adults, patients and thei...

The mix that is suitable to target the specific learning needs and is likely to be accepted by SMEs has yet to be clarified. Recommendations for a good mix of blended learning in SMEs will be developed using a Delphi study design, implemented as a so-called e-Delphi. The sample will be SMEs from Germany and Ireland, international providers of e-learning, blended learning and lifelong learning a...

Hard Diffraction has been subject of studies for more than 10 years and its event selection has been heavyly based on rapidity gaps because of the colorless nature of the pomeron but soft gluon emission tends to destroy the gaps lowering the efficiency to identify those events. We present here a first attempt to use techniques developed at DELPHI, one of the 4 experiments at LEP, to select diff...

Here we report a web server, the DelPhi web server, which utilizes DelPhi program to calculate electrostatic energies and the corresponding electrostatic potential and ionic distributions, and dielectric map. The server provides extra services to fix structural defects, as missing atoms in the structural file and allows for generation of missing hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen placement and the co...

Recent measurements of inclusive and exclusive semileptonic b branching ratios are reviewed. Model-independent analyses from ARGUS and CLEO connrm the value B(b ! ``X) = 10:4%, while new analyses from ALEPH obtain higher values above 11%. The diierence is not consistent with measured values of b hadron lifetime. New measurements of B(B ! D ? ``) from CLEO and ALEPH are in good agreement. First ...