It is a special privilege to receive an award that honors Doug Richardson, who was my attending physician during residency. He showed extraordinary dedication to his patients, his colleagues, and his trainees. I thought I would share my thoughts on quality measurement here not only because the care that Doug gave was of the highest quality but also because he believed in applying measurement to...

This article proposes the establishment of a prize fund to incentivise public health research within the BRICS association, which comprises the five major emerging world economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. This would stimulate cooperative healthcare research within the group and, on the proviso that the benefits of the research are made freely available within the associat...

There has been a recent upsurge of advocacy from trialists and policy ‘modernisers’ for far more use of RCTs as the basis for health and wider public policy. This is exemplified by the UK Cabinet Office’s report ‘Test, Learn, Adapt’ (2012). Mainstream policy makers are now being told that they should make policy by experimenting like scientists. Drawing on experience as an applied health servic...

BACKGROUND The role of health communication in vaccination programmes cannot be overemphasized: it has contributed significantly to creating and sustaining demand for vaccination services and improving vaccination coverage. In Nigeria, numerous communication approaches have been deployed but these interventions are not without challenges. We therefore aimed to explore factors affecting the deli...

OBJECTIVE While living overseas in another culture, retirees need to adapt to a new environment but often this causes difficulties, particularly among those elderly who require healthcare services. This study examines factors affecting healthcare service utilisation among Japanese retirees in Malaysia. DESIGN We conducted 6 focus group discussions with Japanese retirees and interviewed 8 rele...

Biology is the science of life and of how living things work. Our students choose to major in biology in college because of a fascination with understanding how living things function, but often they have difficulty in identifying a career that uses their foundation in biology despite the variety of biology-based careers available. The purpose of this discussion is to assist biology students an...

OBJECTIVES To summarize and then assess with a pilot study the use of published best practice recommendations for priority setting during management of multiple healthcare research projects, in a resource-constrained environment. METHODS Medical, economic, business, and operations literature was reviewed to summarize and develop a survey to assess best practices for managing multiple projects...

This paper reflects on the relationship between theory and practice in bioethics, by using various concepts drawn from debates on innovation in healthcare research--in particular debates around how best to connect up blue skies 'basic' research with practical innovations that can improve human lives. It argues that it is a mistake to assume that the most difficult and important questions in bio...

Fieldwork is a project in which ‘researcher, researched and research make each other’ (Rose, 1997, p. 316), yet far more attention has been given to the making of the research and researcher than to the researched. Focusing on three aspects of the research process (the researcher’s presence in the field, research topic and choice of methods), this paper uses examples from the author’s own field...