OBJECTIVES The views of practitioners at the 'sharp end' of care provision are increasingly recognised as important indicators of quality of care. The National Health Service (NHS) Staff Survey in England has quantified employees' views on how far they would be happy with the standard of care provided by their organisation if a friend or family member needed treatment. We aimed to characterise ...

The proportion of women and children receiving health care in the poorest countries is increasing [1]. Unfortunately, markers of improved health outcomes, such as falling maternal or newborn mortality, have not matched expectations from the gains in the coverage of care. Robust evidence exists for one explanatory factor: the poor–rich gaps in coverage found along the continuum of care for women...

INTRODUCTION The health service involves a spectrum of personnel working together towards achieving a common goal, namely the delivery of high quality health care. This involves a large volume of communication between members of staff and patients and their relatives. Doctors are trained to deal with various clinical situations but receive little or no training in communication skills and there...

OBJECTIVES The global population of elderly people is increasing at a remarkable rate, which may be expected to continue for some time. Older patients require more care, and with the current model of care delivery, the costs may be expected to rise, although higher cost is unsustainable. For this reason, a new pattern of practice is needed. Telemedicine will be presented as a highly effective a...

BACKGROUND While the provision of gender affirming care for transgender people in South Africa is considered legal, ethical, and medically sound, and is-theoretically-available in both the South African private and public health sectors, access remains severely limited and unequal within the country. As there are no national policies or guidelines, little is known about how individual health ca...

Health systems can be improved appreciably by making them more efficient and accountable, and enhancing the quality of care, without necessarily requiring additional resources. Australia, like other nations, cannot escape making difficult health care choices in the context of resource scarcity, and the challenge of delivering quality care, informed by best available evidence, to an ageing popul...

As HCFA initiates the next generation of health plan performance measures, the agency must address challenges associated with measuring the quality of care in all of the settings in which Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries obtain care. One such challenge will be to integrate health plan performance measurement and health care quality measurement initiatives, which have been proceeding separate...

Looking into a future marked by intense competition for talent, growing numbers of employers are striving to create "workplaces of choice." Yet, despite the consensus that health human resources are a vital piece of the healthcare reform puzzle, few health service organizations have developed comprehensive strategies to address work environment issues. The cumulative impact of years of cost-cut...

BACKGROUND National and international statistics from Iran have indicated that progresses and achievements have been made for most health indicators, but there are differences in some indicators in special groups and at the provincial level. OBJECTIVES Our aim was to assess the main predictors of inequity in seeking Health Care Utilities (HCU) locally. PATIENTS AND METHODS Data gathered fro...

Over the last four decades there has been an increasing emphasis on quality in health care. According to a series of recent US reports, however, there is no longer just a gap between what this quality is and what it could be, but a widening chasm (1). Crossing that chasm will be no simple task. It requires us to confront competing values that are at the heart of the major debates in public heal...