The Health Workers Society (HWS), founded in 1980, was one of several progressive health organisations that fought for a democratic health system in South Africa. We document the sociopolitical context within which it operated and some of its achievements. HWS, many of whose members were staff and students of the University of Cape Town (UCT), provided a forum for debate on health-related issue...

Corresponding Author: Adamu Murtala Zungeru Department of Electrical, Computer and Telecommunication Engineering, College of Engineering and Technology, Botswana International University of Science and Technology, Private Bag 16, Palapye, Botswana Email: [email protected] Abstract: As technology keeps on evolving, different organisations make use of the recent trends in technology and the he...

Drivers to improving clinical outcomes Sue Creehan opened the symposium by reminding the audience of the current pressures that healthcare organisations face in delivering optimal care to patients. Currently, healthcare organisations are driven to improve clinical outcomes while at the same time remaining financially solvent in a competitive healthcare arena. There is now a focus on becoming wh...

In the last decade, many information system (IS) implementations took place in the healthcare organisations. Mainstream reasons for this evolvement are the increase of quality and safety of care, and reducing costs. As in many other sectors IS implementations in healthcare are complex, and confronted with many types of difficulties that significantly hinder achieving the objected benefits. So f...

Effective evaluation of healthcare information systems is necessary in order to ensure systems adequately meet the requirements and information processing needs of the users and healthcare organisations. A number of studies have proposed evaluation frameworks to aid in evaluation work. However, some of them can be improved upon. This paper proposes a novel evaluation model to evaluate user acce...

In this article the author examines the concepts of moral distress and moral courage within the context of nursing practice. Examples of challenging healthcare situations from the United Kingdom and Ireland are discussed in the light of the examination of these two concepts. The examples illuminate features of healthcare situations that need to be considered in relation to different organisatio...

This paper examines the social impact of healthcare systems upon two key stakeholders: patients and healthcare workers. The paper focuses upon ‘privacy’, a growing concern of organisations involved in the delivery of healthcare services. Surprisingly, privacy is typically undervalued in information systems development, including healthcare systems. This paper applies a developmental privacy fra...

BACKGROUND Continuous improvements of IT-performance in healthcare organisations require actionable performance indicators, regularly conducted, independent measurements and meaningful and scalable reference groups. Existing IT-benchmarking initiatives have focussed on the development of reliable and valid indicators, but less on the questions about how to implement an environment for conductin...

This paper disseminates findings from a Lean healthcare project in a UK National Health Service (NHS) Single Point of Access; a new healthcare case study setting. Action research was applied and Lean tools used to establish current state processes, customer values and develop improvement opportunities. It was found that interface issues between primary and secondary healthcare organisations wer...