Although Intensive Care Medicine is a young specialty compared with other medical disciplines, it currently plays a key role in the process of care for many patients. Experience has shown that professionals with specific training in Intensive Care Medicine are needed to provide high quality care to critically ill patients. In Europe, important steps have been taken towards the standardization o...

The authors examine black, white, and Hispanic children's differing experiences in early childhood care and education and explore links between these experiences and racial and ethnic gaps in school readiness. Children who attend center care or preschool programs enter school more ready to learn, but both the share of children enrolled in these programs and the quality of care they receive diff...

Although collaboration between obstetricians and neonatologists may seem an obvious way to provide the best quality care to infants and their mothers, this has not always occurred. This article highlights the experiences of several recently published efforts demonstrating how coordinated care resulted in improved clinical outcomes.

Implementing quality assurance (QA) programs in unregulated non-institutional settings remains a challenge for home- and community-based service providers. A sample of 65 Elderly and Disabled (E&D) Waiver providers were presented with eight problem scenarios commonly found in homecare services. Each of the respondents was able to identify strategies they would use to recognize and address each ...

Hospitals must implement staff development programs to assure that nurses and other staff have requisite knowledge, attitudes, and skills to provide quality care for patients who are victims of domestic violence. The author describes a community campus partnership designed to improve care through use of a logic model which follows these steps: needs and assets assessment, capacity building, pro...

Implementation science is a set of tools, principles, and methodologies that can be used to bring scientific evidence into action, improve health care quality and delivery, and improve public health. As the burden of cancer increases in low- and middle-income countries, it is important to plan cancer control programs that are both evidence based and delivered in ways that are feasible, cost-eff...

Paying health care providers to meet quality goals is an idea with widespread appeal, given the common perception that quality of care in the United States remains unacceptably low despite a decade of benchmarking and public reporting. There has been little critical analysis of the design of the current generation of quality incentive programs. In this paper we examine public reports of paying ...

In the last decade, there has been a rapidly growing emphasis and imperative for healthcare quality improvement. With the vast number of stakeholders involved, it is reaching a pinnacle of activity and requirements. The federal government has been developing and implementing quality initiatives across the healthcare system spectrum. This article looks at three major programs: the Hospital Value...