Background Some currently provided health services have an absence of evidence for effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and/or safety. These are candidates for disinvestment. It is possible that such services would prove valuable if trials were to be conducted however, making disinvestment a clear risk. Provision of these services in the context of usual care is a considerable barrier to conductin...

Multimorbidity is increasing in frequency. It can be quantitatively measured and is a major correlate of high use of health services resources of all types, especially over time. The ACG System for characterizing multimorbidity is the only widely used method that is based on combinations of different TYPES of diagnoses over time, rather than the presence or absence of particular conditions or n...

BACKGROUND The most important and contested element of nursing identity may be the patient-centredness of nursing, though this concept is not well-treated in the nursing identity literature. More conceptually-based mapping of nursing identity constructs are needed to help nurses shape their identity. The field of computational text analytics offers new opportunities to scrutinise how growing di...

In a 2006 article in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, Herman et al argued cogently that adopting a health services research (HSR) paradigm would help resolve some of the issues that the complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) community and those researching CAM face with randomized controlled trials. Although the article makes a strong case for HSR and CAM, it fails to discuss...

BACKGROUND This study aims to identify the statistical software applications most commonly employed for data analysis in health services research (HSR) studies in the U.S. The study also examines the extent to which information describing the specific analytical software utilized is provided in published articles reporting on HSR studies. METHODS Data were extracted from a sample of 1,139 art...

As the electronic data generated by health systems improves, health care executives are beginning to ask whether they should build an internal research function in their organization, and if they do, how they can ensure both academic excellence and that the research is relevant to the strategic interests of their organization. This report documents the experience of three health systems that ha...

BACKGROUND Diabetes health services research often utilizes secondary data sources, including survey self-report and Medicare claims, to identify and study the diabetic population, but disagreement exists between these two data sources. We assessed agreement between the Chronic Condition Warehouse diabetes algorithm for Medicare claims and self-report measures of diabetes. Differences in health...

BACKGROUND: In order to profile the health services research community in Australia and New Zealand and describe its capacity, a web-based survey was administered to members of the Health Services Research Association of Australia and New Zealand (HSRAANZ) and delegates of the HSRAANZ's Third Health Services Research and Policy Conference. RESULTS: Responses were received from 191 individuals (...

BACKGROUND Little is known about whether peer support improves outcomes for people with severe mental illness. METHOD A systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted. Cochrane CENTRAL Register, Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, and CINAHL were searched to July 2013 without restriction by publication status. Randomised trials of non-residential peer support interventions were included. Trial inte...