In response to the Institute of Medicine's To Err Is Human report on the prevalence of medical errors, the Leapfrog Group, an organization that promotes hospital safety and quality, established a voluntary hospital survey assessing compliance with several safety standards. Using data from the period 2002-07, we conducted the first longitudinal assessment of how hospitals in specific cities and ...

Although there is no clear concept of volition or the will, we do have intuitive ideas that characterize the will, agency, and voluntary behavior. Here I review results from a number of strands of neuroscientific research that bear upon our intuitive notions of the will. These neuroscientific results provide some insight into the neural circuits mediating behaviors that we identify as related t...

The ability to perform an appropriate response in the presence of competing alternatives is a critical facet of human behavioral control. This is especially important if a response is prepared for execution but then has to be changed suddenly. A popular hypothesis of basal ganglia (BG) function suggests that its direct and indirect pathways could provide a neural mechanism to rapidly switch fro...

Activity of mecillinam against ESBL producers in vitro K. Thomas, M. J. Weinbren*, M. Warner, N. Woodford and D. Livermore Department of Microbiology, Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital, University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire, Stoney Stanton Road, Coventry CV1 4FH, UK; Antibiotic Resistance Monitoring and Reference Laboratory, Centre for Infections, Health Protection Agency, 61 Colin...

BACKGROUND Recruiting and retaining healthcare professionals (HCPs) for rural areas is challenging throughout the world. Although rural origin HCPs have been identified as being the most likely to work in rural areas, only a small number of rural-origin South African scholars are trained as HCPs each year and many do not return to work in rural areas. AIM The aim of this article was to presen...

Accreditation, as an approach to quality assurance and improvement, has a hundred-year history in the United States. Other countries have started to establish such systems in the past twenty years. Recently, we have witnessed numerous discussions and some practical steps toward establishing accreditation systems in Iran. A major practical challenge for such newer accreditation systems is that...

While a dairy cooperative provided the bylaws, managing a cooperative of rural hospitals has been a learn-as-you-go experience. This article presents the management principles that have been learned over the last 13 years. Its experience suggests that developing and managing partnerships requires behaviors different from those typically associated with the management of individual organizations.

By Surgeon-Major Herbert Greene, A.M.D. I shall in this paper confine myself to the consideration of diet in European Hospitals alone, for to treat exhaustively the very important and complex question of diet in Native Hospitals as well, would require lengthened space, and more special knowledge than I have at my disposal. I may be allowed, however, to remark enpassant that the ? latter subject...