Sodium reduction strategies on a population-based level are promoted as a public health intervention. Small and rural hospitals in Illinois were funded to adopt sodium reduction strategies as an intervention, have their hospital cafeteria and vending machines assessed via an environmental scan, and participate in an evaluation. Intervention strategies to identify and to label lower-sodium foods...

This article describes the emerging trend of using metrics in rural hospitals to achieve world-class performance. This trend is a response to the fact that rural hospitals have small patient volumes yet must maintain a profit margin in order to fulfill their mission to the community. The conceptual idea for this article is based largely on Robert Kaplan and David Norton's Balanced Scorecard art...

Congress introduced the Rural Health Care Transition (RHCT) Grant Program in 1989 to assist financially troubled, small rural hospitals. This article discusses grant effects on the second cohort of hospitals to complete their 3-year grants. Although three-quarters of the grantees implemented all or most of their goals, 11 percent could not implement a viable project. Grantees added or upgraded ...

Even the smallest, most isolated rural hospitals are now required to have bioterrorism preparedness plans. From the perspective of many rural hospitals, however, there is a disparity between Federal expectations and the realities of small hospitals operating in geographically isolated communities. As part of an effort to better understand how to close this gap, the Walsh Center for Rural Health...

Many rural communities across canada are facing challenges to the sustainability of core emergency and acute care health services, primarily due to problems with medical and nursing staffing. Data related to service efficacy and effectiveness are not well organized. Most of Canada still relies on reporting by large geopolitical areas (local health areas) that do not always relate natural catchm...

BACKGROUND Aeromedical transport in northern areas may be associated with hypothermia. The objective of this study was to determine whether significant hypothermia (core temperature <35 masculineC) occurs in severely injured or ill intubated patients during transport by rotary wing aircraft. METHODS In this prospective cohort study, all intubated patients over 16 years of age who were transpo...

The pressures for closer alignment between physicians and hospitals in both rural and urban areas are increasing. This study empirically specifies independent dimensions of physician and clinical integration and compares the extent to which such activities are practiced between rural and urban hospitals and among rural hospitals in different organizational and market contexts. Results suggest t...

This article gives a short and elementary presentation of random evolutions toward applications in reliability and quality engineering. At first, the following two examples are presented: dynamical stochastic systems and increment processes both in Markov media. A dynamical system in continuous time is presented since nowadays they are widely used in dynamic reliability modeling. Limit theorems...

We consider the gradient flow associated to the following functionals Fm(φ) = ∫ M 1 + |∇ν| dμ . The functionals are defined on hypersurfaces immersed in R via a map φ : M → R, where M is a smooth closed and connected n–dimensional manifold without boundary. Here μ and ∇ are respectively the canonical measure and the Levi–Civita connection on the Riemannian manifold (M, g), where the metric g is...