OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between public perceptions of key performance indicators assessing various aspects of the health-care system. DESIGN Cross-sequential survey research. Annual telephone surveys of random samples of adult Albertans selected by random digit dialing and stratified according to age, sex and region (n = 4000 for each survey year). The survey questionnaires incl...

background & aim: to assess functionality status and surgical outcome of fenestration versus laminotomy technique based on core outcome measures index (comi) in patients with lumbar disc hernia (ldh). methods & materials/patients: a cross-sectional study was performed between january 2007 and april 2012. a total of 108 patients with a single-level disc herniation were asked to respond to the os...

BACKGROUND Cancer centers are pressured to deliver high-quality services that can be measured and improved, which has led to an increase of assessments in many countries. A critical area of quality improvement is to improve patient outcome. An overview of existing assessments can help stakeholders (e.g., healthcare professionals, managers and policy makers) improve the quality of cancer researc...

Little is known about motor development in late preterm born infants. Our objective was to determine long-term outcome of motor skills of infants born between 32 and 34 weeks. All infants were assessed at corrected ages of 3 and 9 months, using the Alberta Infant Motor Scale. At corrected ages of 4 years, the Movement Assessment Battery for Children was done. Seventy infants were seen at 4 year...

OBJECTIVE Follow-up studies in very preterm children usually present outcome for separate developmental domains. Presence of disabilities in more than one developmental domain will show a more serious outcome picture for extreme preterm infants and may be related to a different degree of perinatal problems. METHODS At 5.5 years corrected age, outcome in the neurological, motor, cognitive, and...

background: the agricultural sector is one of the most important sectors in production. the safety and health of farmers are important factors that can cause a significant increase in efficiency and productivity. the aim of this study was the assessment of musculoskeletal disorders (msds) using the ovako working posture analysis system (owas) and evaluation of the effect of ergonomic training o...

BACKGROUND We summarize the findings of assessments of projects, programs, and research studies (collectively referred to as projects) included in a larger review of the effectiveness of community-based primary health care (CBPHC) in improving maternal, neonatal and child health (MNCH). Findings on neonatal and child health are reported elsewhere in this series. METHODS We searched PUBMED and...

background: although evidences emphasize on the importance of aftercare programs to achieve continuity of care, different studies have revealed controversial results about the outcome. the objective of this study was to investigate the effect of aftercare program on outcome measures of patients with severe mental disorders. materials and methods: of a total 123 eligible patients with severe men...

We review a series of case studies from English health authorities that have tackled the assessment and improvement of health outcomes. We reflect their concerns and difficulties and the lessons they learnt. We identified case studies from a telephone survey of 91 representatives of the 100 English health authorities (61 were directors of public health). We edited 26 structured case studies whi...

In this paper we propose a method for generating OWA weighting vectors from the individual assessments on a set of alternatives in such a way that these weights maximize the consensus among individual assessments with respect to the outcome provided by the OWA operator. Keywords—OWA operators; consensus; distances; mathematical programming.