BACKGROUND High performing hospitals attain excellence across multiple measures of performance and multiple departments. Studying high performing hospitals can be valuable if factors associated with high performance can be identified and applied. Factors leading to high performance are complex and an exclusive quantitative approach may fail to identify richly descriptive or relevant contextual ...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have identified medication errors in preparing and administering intravenous medicines of 13-84% in hospitals in individual countries. OBJECTIVE To compare the effect of the design and implementation of systems for the preparation and administration of intravenous therapy in hospitals in three European countries on the number of observed medication errors. To gain ...

Studies of hospital efficiency seldom lead to changes in practice, partly because recommendations are unspecific or results are not seen as robust. We describe a method to compare hospital costs that utilises patient-level data. We perform a two-stage analysis in which we first consider factors that explain costs among patients and then across hospital departments. We illustrate our approach by...

PURPOSE The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine developmental trends in healthcare organisation management practice and improvement work. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH Primary healthcare centre (n = 1,031) and clinical hospital department (n = 1,542) managers were surveyed in spring 2007 (response rate 46 per cent). This article compares results from this survey with a study in 2003...

Very little of WHO's work is done by the Organization alone. Much of it takes the form of coordination and collaboration in which WHO acts in partnership with governments, institutions-both governmental and nongovernmental-and individual scientists and other workers in the field of health. As the following article shows, collaboration with a university hospital department enriches both partners...

Morgan O’Connor1,4, Samuel Moulton1, Brenna M Lobb3 and Amie L Peterson2,3* 1Oregon Health and Sciences University School of Medicine, Portland, USA 2Oregon Health and Science University Department of Neurology, Parkinson’s Center of Oregon, Portland, USA 3Veterans Affairs Hospital Department of Neurology, Parkinson’s Disease Research, Education and Clinical Center, Portland, USA 4Department of...

The last few years have witnessed an increasing interest in organizing sterilization. Every new hospital now being planned in the British Isles includes provision for a central sterile supply department and many existing hospitals are also planning such departments. Several of these are likely to be opened within the next year or two. At the present rates of progress there will be few hospitals...

BACKGROUND Hospitals have expressed no knowledge of patients' opinions regarding diversified appointment registration systems, despite efforts to develop novel appointment registration systems that assist patients and increase hospital efficiency. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the use of diversified appointment registration systems and explore the factors influencing patie...

OBJECTIVE To determine the change in adverse event (AE) rates and preventable AE rates over time, identify certain patient risk groups and discuss factors influencing the outcome. DESIGN Longitudinal retrospective patient record review study. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS A random sample of 21 hospitals in The Netherlands in 2004, and 20 hospitals in 2008. In each hospital, 400 patient admission...

BACKGROUND Simulation-based medical education (SBME) has traditionally been conducted as off-site simulation in simulation centres. Some hospital departments also provide off-site simulation using in-house training room(s) set up for simulation away from the clinical setting, and these activities are called in-house training. In-house training facilities can be part of hospital departments and ...