BACKGROUND In recent years out-of-hours primary care in the Netherlands has changed from practice-based to large-scale cooperatives. The purpose of this study is to determine patient satisfaction with current out-of-hours care organised in general practitioner (GP) cooperatives, and gain insight in factors associated with this satisfaction. METHODS From March to June 2003, 2805 questionnaires...

In this study, we use a conventional Probit model to investigate the effects of banks’ cost efficiency on innovation in Italy. particular, assess whether efficiency–innovation relation depends type banking institutions, as partition them according they are cooperatives or non-cooperatives. When examine two types financial intermediaries simultaneously, higher among cooperative banks has positiv...

maintenance relationships customers, suppliers and the community are of key factors, maintenance work positive relationshipsin cooperatives.if ownership and structureof cooperativenot entitle of protection and support cooperationculture,will endanger overturning.based on the purpose of this study was analysis of social-cultural factors effecting of production cooperatives' success greenhou...

despite various efforts towards empowerment of cooperatives in iran, much in agreement with this concept and strategies can not be observed. the purpose of this descriptive study was to investigate the solutions to empowering production cooperatives. the delphi technique was employed to do this study. the target population consisted of specialists in national provincial and specialists (n=15). ...

In this paper, we present a directly applicable scheme for electricity consumption shifting and effective demand curve flattening. The scheme can employ the services of either individual or cooperating consumer agents alike. Agents participating in the scheme, however, are motivated to form cooperatives, in order to reduce their electricity bills via lower group prices granted for sizable consu...

Introduction: This article is part of a Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on Health Record Banking. Background: Healthcare is often ineffective and costs are steadily rising. This is in a large part due to the inaccessibility of medical and health data stored in multiple silos. Further more, in most cases molecular differences between individuals that result in different suscept...

This paper reports how a new model of social enterprise—the social cooperative (SCs)—has become instrumental, in the Italian context, in the expansion of the social economy. It underlines the contribution these associations have made toward broadening the concept and standard parameters of volunteer organizations, providing basic social welfare services, and integrating the disadvantaged into t...

Cooperative fishery management assigns management rights, formally or informally, to a group of users. Assigning rights to groups rather than individuals can be advantageous, given the shared, common-pool nature of fish stocks. Efficiency can potentially be improved by coordinating harvests over space and time, providing public good inputs, sharing information and setting quality standards. Man...