Qualifications for appointments to substantive consultant posts

Changes in recruitment to public health consultant posts and hospital consultant posts in England: potential impact on the sustainability of the Public Health system.

BACKGROUND The UK government has proposed major changes to the Public Health system in England. This study aims quantify increasing anecdotal concern that the number of Public Health consultant posts advertised has plummeted since the publication of these plans. METHODS The archives of BMJ careers were interrogated for hospital and Public Health consultant posts advertised October 2008 and Ma...

Substantive thoughts about substantive thoughts: a reply to Galin.

In his commentary, David Galin raises several important issues that deserve to be addressed. In this response, I do three things. First, I briefly discuss the relation between the present work and the metaphoric theories of thought developed by cognitive lin- guists such as Lakoff and Johnson (1998). Second, I address some of the confusions that seem to have arisen about my use of the terms "su...

Charging for missed appointments.

Constraint Qualifications for Nonlinear Programming

This paper deals with optimality conditions to solve nonlinear programming problems. The classical Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions are demonstrated through a cone approach, using the well known Farkas’ Lemma. These conditions are valid at a minimizer of a nonlinear programming problem if a constraint qualification is satisfied. First we prove the KKT theorem supposing the equalit...

Efficacy of Different Reminders to Reduce Missed Orthodontic Appointments

Objectives: Since forgetfulness is the major cause of missed appointments, reminder systems can be used prior to appointments. The present study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of different reminders [e-mails, social networks, telephone, and short message service (SMS)] in order to reduce missed appointments by orthodontic patients. Methods: Of a total of 751 active orthodontic patients, 379 we...