“Avoidable rework” is effort spent fixing difficulties with the software that could have been avoided or discovered earlier and less expensively. This definition implies that there is such thing as “unavoidable rework”. Reducing “avoidable rework” is a major source of software productivity improvement and most effort savings from improving software processes, architectures and risk management a...

OBJECTIVE Potentially avoidable hospitalizations have been identified by experts as leading to poor health outcomes and costly care. Potentially avoidable hospitalizations are particularly common among full-benefit dual eligible beneficiaries. This paper examines potentially avoidable hospitalizations rates by setting, state, and medical condition, and the average cost of these events. METHOD...

BACKGROUND In 2007, 95% of women in Botswana delivered in health facilities with 73% attending at least 4 antenatal care visits. HIV-prevalence in pregnant women was 28.7%. The maternal mortality ratio in 2010 was 163 deaths per 100,000 live births versus the government target of 130 for that year, indicating that the Millennium Development Goal 5 was unlikely to be met. A root-cause analysis w...

PURPOSE Critically ill or injured children require prompt identification, rapid referral and quality emergency management. We undertook a study to evaluate the care pathway of critically ill or injured children to identify preventable failures in the care provided. METHODS A year-long cohort study of critically ill and injured children was performed in Cape Town, South Africa, from first pres...

BACKGROUND Spatial health inequalities have often been analysed in terms of deprivation. The aim of this study was to create an ecological deprivation index and evaluate its association with mortality over the entire mainland France territory. More specifically, the variations with the degree of urbanicity, spatial scale, age, gender and cause of death, which influence the association between m...

OBJECTIVE To assess overall and cause-specific mortality and the quality of somatic care among psychiatric patients. DESIGN A register-based cohort study. SETTING All individuals aged 20-79 years in Sweden in 2005. PARTICIPANTS In total 6 294 339 individuals. PRIMARY OUTCOME MEASURE The individuals were followed for mortality in 2006 and 2007, generating 72 187 deaths. Psychiatric patie...

This paper is freely available online under the BMJ Journals unlocked scheme, see http:// jech.bmj.com/info/unlocked.dtl ABSTRACT Objective: To evaluate the impact of avoidable mortality on the changes in life expectancy at birth in Spain. Methods: Standard life table techniques and the Arriaga method were used to calculate and to decompose life expectancy (LE) changes by age, effects and group...