When a major failure happens in a healthcare organisation in the British NHS an inquiry of some kind usually ensues, tasked with finding out what happened, diagnosing the problems or causes of the failure, and making recommendations for changes in policy or practice which would prevent or make such a failure less likely in the future. The inquiry is akin to an organisational post-mortem, intend...

Introduction Health policy in much of the developed world is concerned with assessing and improving the quality of health care. The USA, in particular, has identified specific concerns over quality issues 2 and a recent report from the Institute of Medicine pointed to the considerable toll of medical errors. In the UK a series of scandals has propelled quality issues to centre stage 5 and made ...

BACKGROUND Despite the widespread use of accreditation in many countries, and prevailing beliefs that accreditation is associated with variables contributing to clinical care and organisational outcomes, little systematic research has been conducted to examine its validity as a predictor of healthcare performance. OBJECTIVE To determine whether accreditation performance is associated with sel...

Objective To describe the implementation of medical revalidation in healthcare organisations in the United Kingdom and to examine reported changes and impacts on the quality of care. Design A cross-sectional online survey gathering both quantitative and qualitative data about structures and processes for medical revalidation and wider quality management in the organisations which employ or cont...

I n the UK about 5000 people die each year from hospital acquired infections. That equates to 65 000 people since this journal was launched in 1992. This is an intolerable toll, which at least in part is linked to failure of healthcare professionals to clean their hands. Evidence that hand hygiene is effective in reducing infection is compelling and is available in the medical literature. So, w...

INTRODUCTION Nowadays several rating systems exist for the evaluation of the sustainability of buildings, but often their focus is limited to environmental and efficiency aspects. Hospitals are complex constructions in which many variables affect hospital processes. Therefore, a research group has developed a tool for the evaluation of sustainability in healthcare facilities. METHODOLOGY The ...

The number of failed software process assessment and improvement programs far outnumber the successes and the improvement rates appear to remain low, because as Garvin (1993) suggests, “continuous improvement programs require a commitment to learning”. This study investigates the relationship between a software process assessment and improvement model and organisational learning, and examines w...

A cross-sectional survey of healthcare professionals from 19 hospitals in six cities of Heilongjiang Province, China was conducted. This study had two objectives: (1) to examine the factors influencing healthcare workers' opinions of strategies to prevent workplace violence, using social support theory, and (2) to encourage healthcare organisations and the larger society to offer greater suppor...

1 Laboratory of Applied Entomology Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, 2 Centre de Biologie et de Gestion des Populations (CBGP), UMR 1062, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), Campus International de Baillarguet, Montferrier-sur-Lez, France, 3 Laboratoire Dynamique de la Biodiversité, UMR CNRS 5172, Université Paul Sabatier...