If we were to paraphrase Voltaire ' s quote on God, we could certainly say that in respect of patient safety it is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Over the past 10 years, there has been a huge volume of data collected on medical error and harm to patients. With many tragic cases of health-care failure and a growing number of major government and professio...

PROBLEM The healthcare system is plagued with increasing cost and poor quality outcomes. A major contributing factor for these issues is that outdated leadership practices, such as leader-centricity, linear thinking, and poor readiness for innovation, are being used in healthcare organizations. SOLUTION Complexity leadership theory provides a new framework with which healthcare leaders may pr...

The passage of federal healthcare reform legislation, in combination with other factors, makes it likely that the next few years will be a major period of consolidation for healthcare organizations. This article examines the seven key forces reshaping healthcare delivery--from insurance industry consolidation to cost inflation to the increasing gap between financially strong and struggling prov...

BACKGROUND To propose health system strategies to meeting the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations on HIV screening through antenatal care (ANC) services, we assessed predictors of HIV screening, and simulated the impact of changes in these predictors on the probability of HIV screening in Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico (State of Chiapas), Nicaragua, Panama, and El Salvador. METHODS W...

The health care quality chasm is better described as a gulf for certain segments of the population, such as racial and ethnic minority groups, given the gap between actual care received and ideal or best care quality. The landmark Institute of Medicine report Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century challenges all health care organizations to pursue six major aims of...

Consumer advisory boards (CABs) are a way of involving patients in their health care. To engage the homeless in the administration of a health care organization for the homeless, a service agency formed such a board comprising homeless and formerly homeless individuals. The purpose was to integrate experiences of homelessness into programmatic design and research efforts of the organization, an...

BACKGROUND Quality indicators (QI) are used in health care to measure quality of service and performance improvement. Health care professionals and organizations caring for patients with injuries need information regarding the quality of care provided and the outcomes experienced in order to target improvement efforts. However, very little is known about the quality of injury care provided to i...

RATIONALE, AIMS AND OBJECTIVES Many objective measures rating quality of doctors, hospitals, and medical groups are publicly reported. Surgical patients may have more opportunity to use quality measures than other types of patients to guide their choice of provider. If surgical patients are able to choose higher quality providers, overall surgical quality might increase. OBJECTIVE To determin...

Why should public health agencies work with companies or trade associations that represent the business sector? Why should public health entities with altruistic goals work with companies that are primarily motivated by the desire for profit? The differences in mission, perspectives, and priorities create skepticism for public health officials about the motives of the private sector and the ben...

Hospital education departments can better align with the strategic direction of the organization, effectively prioritize work processes, and focus on what matters most to the organization when the organization adopts an assessment process known as the Baldrige Health Care Criteria for Performance Excellence. This article describes the Baldrige assessment process, a framework of seven criteria b...