Over the 30 years of conflict, Northern Ireland escaped the worst excess of illegal drug trafficking and usage. However, the recent 'peace dividend' has brought with it an unprecedented rise in the availability and use of illicit drugs. With this, new problems and pressures have been brought to bear on the health service. The literature would suggest that drug users are loathed and feared by he...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the impact on nutrition- and health-related practice of two methods of delivery of a nutrition and health intervention in Irish full-day-care pre-schools: training of pre-school managers only or training of managers and their staff. DESIGN A simple randomised study with pre-schools divided into two training groups: 'manager trained' and 'manager and staff trained'. Direc...

Staff retention is an ongoing challenge in mental health and community-based service organizations. Little is known about the impact of evidence-based practice implementation on the mental health and social service workforce. The present study examined the effect of evidence-based practice implementation and ongoing fidelity monitoring on staff retention in a children's services system. The stu...

background: nowadays, quality of patient care is one of the major and important concerns of health care delivery which is extremely dependent on the medical staff. objectives: the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between quality of work life (qwl) and quality of patient care. methods: this study was a descriptive-analytic study based on correlation which was conducted i...

OBJECTIVE The service type offered by a home care agency contracted by the Queensland government is not based on the qualifications of the worker providing the service, but the service itself. This allows agencies to substitute certain levels and categories of labour in order to provide a service to meet their contract obligations. This study investigated evidence of labour substitution between...

BACKGROUND Clinical trials conducted in Africa often require substantial investments to support trial centres and public health facilities. Trial resources could potentially generate benefits for routine health service delivery but may have unintended consequences. Strengthening ethical practice requires understanding the potential effects of trial inputs on the perceptions and practices of rou...

AIMS To describe the characteristics of homeless children and families seen by the mental health outreach service (MHOS), to evaluate the impact of this service on the short term psychosocial functioning of children and parents, and to establish perceptions of, and satisfaction with, the service. METHODS Twenty seven children from 23 families who were in receipt of the MHOS and 27 children fr...

Providing patient-centric health care services is the goal of health-care institutions. However, due to human-related aspects, this goal is frequently undermined. PINATA offers an automated patient-centric system based upon Pervasive Ambience Intelligence techniques and enriched with Semantic Web technologies. The system makes use of RFID sensors to track the movements of patients and medical s...