Centralised client/server approaches to supporting software process modelling and enactment are common, but can suffer from serious robustness, performance and security problems. We describe a decentralised architecture for software process modelling and enactment, which also incorporates distributed work coordination, task automation and system integration facilities. Our environment based on ...

CONTEXT Japan's maternal mortality rate is higher than that of other developed countries. OBJECTIVES To identify causes of maternal mortality in Japan, examine attributes of treating facilities associated with maternal mortality, and assess the preventability of such deaths. DESIGN AND SETTING Cross-sectional study of maternal deaths occurring in Japan between January 1, 1991, and December ...

BACKGROUND Offering specialized programming at substance abuse treatment facilities can help diversify clientele and funding sources, potentially enhancing the facilities' ability to survive and/or expand. Past research has shown that facilities only offering specialized programming for driving under the influence/driving while intoxicated offenders (DUI) are predominately private-for-profit ow...

OBJECTIVE Maternal and child health (MCH) care may provide an entry point for HIV services in high HIV-prevalence settings. Our objective was to assess integration of HIV with MCH services in public sector facilities in Swaziland. DESIGN In 2009, 2010 and 2012, client flow assessments (CFAs) were conducted over 5 days in the MCH units of eight government facilities, purposively selected as in...

Objective We assessed the availability of essential medicines for mental healthcare (MH) across levels of the public healthcare system to aid in future systems planning. Design Non-expired MH medications were assessed in 24 public health facilities and 13 district warehouses across Sofala Province, Mozambique, from July to August 2014. Medication categories included: antipsychotics, antidepress...

Worldwide trauma is currently the sixth leading cause of death, according to 10% of mortalities (1,2). Injury impact and the death from trauma are more common in males than females. People aged between 15 and 45 years include about half of the trauma deaths (3). Citizens of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) account for 89% of all deaths from trauma worldwide. This is particularly because...

Unionization may have important implications for the delivery of nursing home care, but little is known about this phenomenon. Since 1985, the proportion of nursing home workers covered by union contracts declined from 14.6% to 9.9%. The first national-scale data on facility-level unionization reveals that unions are more common in nursing homes with more residents, in hospital-based or chain-a...

Currently, there exist many different representations and corresponding data structures for departments in facilities design algorithms. These data structures were developed independently and at different times to satisfy the specific needs of the various design algorithms. As a consequence, layouts generated by different facilities design algorithms are very difficult to compare and the algori...

Since a very long time, a significant number of patients have been seeking treatment at Complementary and Alternative Medicine health facilities, but the disease burden at these facilities has never been assessed and documented. Present cross-sectional study was carried out at Ayurvedic tertiary care hospital to document and to assess the rationale of disease reporting at Ayurvedic institutions...

The facility positioning problem concerns the location of facilities such as bus-stops, fire stations, schools, so as to optimize one or several objectives. This paper contributes to research on location problems by proposing a reactive multiagent approach. Particularly, we deal with the p-median problem, where the objective is to minimize the weighted distance between the demand points and the...