Failure of effective handover is a major preventable cause of patient harm. We aimed to promote accurate recording of high-quality clinical information using an Electronic Handover System (EHS) that would contribute to a sustainable improvement in effective patient care and safety. Within our hospital the human factors associated with poor communication were compromising patient care and unnece...

Healthcare organisations are using redesign to tackle variation in the quality of care and improve public satisfaction. It is represented as a radical challenge to traditional assumptions and practices which involves thinking through the best process to achieve speedy and effective patient care, identifying delays, unnecessary steps, or potential for error, and redesigning the process to improv...

Analgesia prescribing is fundamental to a patient's journey, affecting length of stay and patient experience. Laminated prompts are used throughout the NHS Foundation Trust to aid doctors prescribing. A baseline questionnaire was carried out to gather doctors' prescribing habits and current ability to convert opioids to their morphine equivalent. Ninety three percent of doctors said they were m...

Business process modelling (BPM) is an emerging field of simulation application. Simulation of business processes is increasingly being recognised as an extremely useful tool for assessing the feasibility, efficiency, and effectiveness of process re-engineering decisions. However, almost all of the reported experience is confined to re-engineering initiatives within a single organisation. The p...

It is characteristic of collaborative engineering design that precedence relationships among design activities contain information flow conflicts. Due to multi-actors interaction, conflicts can emerge from disagreements between designers about proposed designs. Hence, a critical element of collaborative design is tomanage the detected conflicts and particularly the impacts once they are resolve...

Healthcare organisations are using redesign to tackle variation in the quality of care and improve public satisfaction. It is represented as a radical challenge to traditional assumptions and practices which involves thinking through the best process to achieve speedy and effective patient care, identifying delays, unnecessary steps, or potential for error, and redesigning the process to improv...

Collective migration of epithelial sheets requires maintenance of cell-cell junctions and co-ordination of the movement of the migrating front. We have investigated the role of keratin intermediate filaments and periplakin, a cytoskeletal linker protein, in the migration of simple epithelial cells. Scratch wounding induces bundling of keratins into a cable of tightly packed filaments adjacent t...

Recent surveys show that business process re-engineering (BPR) has had widespread adoption in western countries. This has been motivated by case studies where drastic improvements in quality, productivity, cost reduction and competitiveness have been reported. The rate of failure in reengineering attempts, though, has been reported to be equally high. It is estimated that over 70 per cent of al...

"Process Re-engineering" is a concept that has been in operation in the manufacturing industry for a number of years. Often, it involves moving an organisation or industry away from its traditionally functional base to process based structures. It is however a relatively new concept in the UK construction industry. This paper will explore the concept of process re-engineering, evaluate its oppo...