BACKGROUND Physicians with more experience are generally believed to have accumulated knowledge and skills during years in practice and therefore to deliver high-quality care. However, evidence suggests that there is an inverse relationship between the number of years that a physician has been in practice and the quality of care that the physician provides. PURPOSE To systematically review st...

While nearly half of U. S. physicians identify language or cultural communication barriers as obstacles to providing high-quality care, physician adoption of practices to overcome such barriers is modest and uneven, according to a new national study by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC). Despite broad consensus among the medical community about how physicians can help to address...

Empathy and compassion provide an important foundation for effective collaboration in health care. Compassion (the recognition of and response to the distress and suffering of others) should be consistently offered by health care professionals to patients, families, staff, and one another. However, compassion without collaboration may result in uncoordinated care, while collaboration without co...

Patient and user choice are at the forefront of the debate on the future direction of health and public services provision in many industrialized countries in Europe and elsewhere. It is used both, as a means to achieve desired policy goals in public health care systems such as greater efficiency and improved quality of care, and as a good with its own intrinsic value. However, the evidence sug...

Health care providers offer an ideal setting to study the effectiveness of resilient behavior. The notion of a resilient organization is an emerging concept for understanding and coping with the modern-day pace of change and associated work stress. Resilience is the ability of an individual or organization to expeditiously design and implement positive adaptive behaviors matched to the immediat...

Competition law (encompassing both antitrust and consumer protection) is the forgotten stepchild of health care quality. This paper introduces readers to competition law and policy, describes its institutional features and analytic framework, surveys the ways in which competition law has influenced quality-based competition, and outlines some areas in need of further development. Competition la...

There are many biases concerning the application of competition law in health care. Quality concerns can however be integrated into competition law analysis. The aim of this paper is to identify the links between the application of competition law in the European Union and the right to quality health care and to point out the problems that arise when integrating quality concerns in competition ...

The aim of the present study was to achieve, using an affect theory approach (Tomkins, 1962; 1963; 1991), a deeper theoretical understanding of the psychological significance of hospital clowns' work in caring for ailing children viewed from a care-giver perspective. The methodological approach was qualitative and based on 20 interviews with healthcare staff: 3 men and 17 women. The result show...

There are widespread and growing concerns about the variable and too often inadequate quality of health care in the United States. As a result, health care quality is being questioned and subjected to scrutiny as never before. Awareness of the quality deficits, combined with rising health care expenditures and changing attitudes of payers and consumers, has given rise to a nascent but growing q...

Paying health care providers to meet quality goals is an idea with widespread appeal, given the common perception that quality of care in the United States remains unacceptably low despite a decade of benchmarking and public reporting. There has been little critical analysis of the design of the current generation of quality incentive programs. In this paper we examine public reports of paying ...