Hospital overcrowding is a serious condition that threatens patient quality and a health system’s bottom line. Discrete-event simulation (DES), due to its ability to accurately predict outcomes in complex systems in both manufacturing and service industry design and improvement, is a well-matched choice for studying organizations with elevated variation. The objective of this study was to, thro...

This paper reports from an ethnographic study of hospital planning in England undertaken between 2006 and 2009. We explored how a policy to centralise hospital services was espoused in national policy documents, how this shifted over time and how it was translated in practice. We found that policy texts defined hospital planning as a clinical issue and framed decisions to close hospitals or hos...

Limited evidence exists on whether government owned-and-funded hospital accreditation system brings long-lasting impact in terms of continuous quality improvement to patient care. Literature shows that hospitals might adopt opportunistic behaviors solely with the aim of gaining accreditation particularly when governments link the quality improvement objective of accreditation with payment mecha...

During the past six decades, data analysis and research studies have been instrumental in shaping public and private health care policy. Policymakers obtain the knowledge they need for making policy decisions through exposure to and examination of data generated through research studies, experimentation, demonstrations, and analyses. In this article, U.S. hospital care policy has been divided i...

PURPOSE We aimed to assess the impact of UK primary care policy reforms implemented in April 2004 on potentially avoidable unplanned short-stay hospital admissions for children with primary care-sensitive conditions. METHODS We conducted an interrupted time series analysis of hospital admissions for all children aged younger than 15 years in England between April 2000 and March 2012 using dat...

AIMS To assess the impact of blood culture results and early clinical liaison on the treatment of patients with bacteraemia. METHODS 123 patients with significant positive blood cultures were followed over a nine month period in a 620 bed teaching hospital. The impact of early blood culture reporting and clinical liaison on the cost and appropriateness of treatment was assessed. RESULTS Emp...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to develop a policy characterisation process based on measuring shifts in use of private health insurance (PHI) immediately following implementation of changes in federal health care policy. METHOD Population-based hospital morbidity data from 1980 to 2001 were used to produce trend lines in the annual proportions of public, privately insured and privately ...

81 In 2007, a landmark series of papers on mental health appeared in The Lancet. 1 Some of the key messages emerging from the series were that mental disorders are inextricably linked with other concerns: there can be " no health without mental health " ; mental disorders affect people in all societies, but especially the disadvantaged, vulnerable and poor; mental disorders are a leading cause ...