BACKGROUND By means of the ICONAS project, the Healthcare Agency of an Italian Region developed, and used a standardised questionnaire to quantify the organisational climate. The aims of the project were (a) to investigate whether the healthcare institutions were interested in measuring climate, (b) to estimate the range of applicability and reliability of the instrument, (c) to analyse the dim...

INTRODUCTION Healthcare organisations are nowadays expecting the support of IT in the daily routines. Personal digital assistants (PDAs) are in use in some healthcare organisations but in an irregular and unplanned way. The aim of the present study was to describe nurses' and nurse students' demands of functions and usability in a PDA. METHODS Interviews were made with 12 nurses at the County...

BACKGROUND Reform of primary healthcare (PHC) organisations is underway in Canada. The capacity of various types of PHC organizations to respond to populations' needs remains to be assessed. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the association of PHC affiliation with unmet needs for care. METHODS Population-based survey of 9205 randomly selected adults in two regions of Quebec, Ca...

Context Healthcare organisations in Saudi Arabia are striving to improve patient safety and quality of care through implementation of safety systems and creating a culture of safety. Objective The purpose of this study to evaluate the extent to which the culture supports patient safety at Saudi hospitals. Data Collection A survey questionnaire was distributed hospital-wide in 13 general hospita...

nancing (RBF) as one of fi ve actions being taken as part of the Global Campaign for the Health Millennium Development Goals and plans to support the use of RBF through the World Bank and in bilateral agreements with selected countries focusing on achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of reducing child and maternal mortality (MDG 4 and 5).RBF-schemes can be targeted at different lev...

This article examines the development of two distinct models of organising allied health professionals within two public sector health service organisations in Australia. The first case illustrated a mode of organising that facilitated a culture that focused on asset protection and whose external orientation was threat oriented because its disparate multiple identities operated as a fractured, ...

OBJECTIVES Efforts to improve healthcare and population health depend partly on the ability of health organisations to use research knowledge and participate in its production. We report the findings of a survey conducted to prioritise training needs among healthcare and public health staff, in relation to the production and implementation of research, across an applied health research collabor...

BACKGROUND Improved management of clinicians' time and practice is advocated to address increasing demands on healthcare provision in the UK National Health Service (NHS). Human resource management (HRM) is associated with improvements in organisational performance and outcomes within and outside of healthcare, but with limited use in managing individual clinicians. This may reflect the absence...

Current management thinking largely assumes that a well functioning organisation is akin to a well oiled machine. This leads to the notion that performance is optimised when work is specified in detail and shared out to distinct operational units. Clinicians often object to these detailed specifications, while managers bemoan a lack of cooperation. The first article in this series introduced an...

BACKGROUND Healthcare policy appears to treat healthcare organisations as being homogenous, despite evidence that they vary considerably. This study develops a taxonomy of primary health care practices using characteristics associated with the job satisfaction of general medical practitioners (GPs) and the practices. METHODS The study used data from 3,662 survey respondents who were GPs in th...