BACKGROUND Relatively ignored in the literature on quality improvement (QI) in health care is the question of who defines the issues in quality of care and decides how those issues will be addressed. METHODS In late 1992, 669 hospital administrators, quality assurance (QA) coordinators, physicians, and nurses in 72 hospitals in six states were surveyed by telephone. Respondents were asked to ...

Policy Survey asked hospital executives in five countries— Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States—for their views of their nation’s health care system, the level and quality of their hospitals’ resources, and efforts to improve quality of care.U.K.executives expressed confidence that hospital waiting lists are improving from what they were two years ago.When a...

This case study describes a collaborative project to reduce mercury in hospitals in Ecuador and Mexico and at the same time, to train environmental health and safety specialists and hospital staff on a process for reducing occupational and environmental hazards. The ultimate goal was to increase expertise in pollution prevention among hospital workers and enable hospitals to advance mercury red...

Health care providers, hospital administrators, and politicians face competing challenges to reduce clinical errors, control expenditure, increase access and throughput, and improve quality of care. The safe management of the acutely ill inpatient presents particular difficulties. In the first of five Lancet articles on this topic we discuss patients' safety in the acute hospital. We also prese...

The merits of chest surveys or screening by roentgen means cannot be disputed, provided adequate facilities and qualified professional personnel are available. The general principles governing such routine chest examinations, i.e., hospital admission screening, mass surveys, pre-employment and pre-induction examinations, are not dissimilar. While it is not the primary intent nor within the prov...

BACKGROUND Patient and provider-related factors affecting access to cardiac rehabilitation (CR) have been extensively studied, but health-system administration factors have not. The objectives of this study were to investigate hospital administrators' (HA) awareness and knowledge of cardiac rehabilitation (CR), perceptions regarding resources for and benefit of CR, and attitudes toward and impl...