background and objectives: services quality has become the major concern of policy-makers in the present rapidly growing consumer-oriented health industry. however, there is a major gap in the relevant literature in malaysia in this particular field. thus, this research attempted to narrow this gap by conducting a qualitative study to gain insight into quality of healthcare services in the mala...

Healthcare policy leaders internationally recognise that people's experiences of healthcare delivery are important, and invest significant resources to monitor and improve them. However, the value of particular aspects of experiences of healthcare delivery - relative to each other and to other healthcare outcomes - is unclear. This paper considers how economic techniques have been and might be ...

The 21 century promises to usher in an era of online healthcare services, i.e. Tele-Healthcare, inspired by the emergence of sophisticated, ‘intelligent’ information systems/agents working in tandem with the Internet/WWW. Currently, world-wide healthcare delivery is undergoing a paradigm shift—patient centred services as opposed to provider centred services and wellness maintenance as opposed t...

The delivery of prevention services to children and adolescents through traditional healthcare settings is challenging for a variety of reasons. Parent- and community-focused services are typically not reimbursable in traditional medical settings, and personal healthcare services are often designed for acute and chronic medical treatment rather than prevention. To provide preventive services in...

Primary healthcare offers significant benefits to Canadians and to the healthcare system as a whole. The Taber Integrated Primary Healthcare Project (TIPHP) was a three-year primary healthcare renewal initiative involving rural physicians and the Chinook Health Region in Taber, Alberta, Canada. The goal of the project was to improve healthcare services delivery through integration of the servic...

background: except in emergency cases, all patients should be seen first by a primary healthcare physician who decides whether a referral to secondary care is necessary. the present study examined the reasons for patient self-referral to specialists. methods: a random sample of 1036 individuals was selected from people attending public outpatient clinics and specialists’ offices in the private ...

INTRODUCTION The USA lags behind other high-income countries in many health indicators. Outcome differences are associated with differences in the relative spending between healthcare and social services at the national level. The impact of the ratio and delivery of social and healthcare services on the individual patient's health is however unknown. 'Reframing Healthcare Services through the L...

Not all eligible women use the available services under India's Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), which provides cash incentives to encourage pregnant women to use institutional care for childbirth; limited evidence exists on demand-side factors associated with low program uptake. This study explores the views of women and ASHAs (community health workers) on the use of the JSY and institutional del...

INTRODUCTION The provision of healthcare services in developing countries has received increasing attention, but inequalities persist. One nation with potential inequalities in healthcare services is Equatorial Guinea (Central-West Africa). Mitigating these inequalities is difficult, as the Equatoguinean healthcare system remains relatively understudied. METHODS In this study, we interviewed ...

Efforts to ensure effective participation of patients in healthcare are called by many names-patient centredness, patient engagement, patient experience. Improvement initiatives in this domain often resemble the efforts of manufacturers to engage consumers in designing and marketing products. Services, however, are fundamentally different than products; unlike goods, services are always 'coprod...