Although an increasing number of hospitals are reporting net losses from the Medicare prospective payment system (PPS) for inpatient care, overall hospital facility profit rates remain stable. Hospitals that reported net profits in the Medicare inpatient PPS sector in PPS 7 (1990) had smaller increases in Medicare expenses than hospitals that reported PPS losses in PPS 7. Medicare PPS inpatient...

The Prospective Payment System (PPS) based on a patient’s diagnosis procedure combination (DPC) was introduced in 82 technologically advanced hospitals nationwide in Japan in April 2003. This system was later expanded to private general hospitals that offer acute care, bringing the number of participating institutions to 1557 in fiscal year 2009. As a top vendor in the healthcare system market,...

BACKGROUND Young French postgraduates in general practice increasingly prefer salaried practice to private practice in spite of the financial incentives offered by the French government or local communities to encourage the latter. This study aimed to explore the determinants of choice between private or salaried practice among young general practitioners. METHODS A qualitative study was cond...

BACKGROUND Supervision forms an integral part of psychiatric nursing. The value of clinicalsupervision has been demonstrated widely in research. Despite efforts made toward advancedpsychiatric nursing, supervision seems to be non-existent in this field. OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to explore and describe advanced psychiatric nursepractitioners' ideas and needs with regard to supervis...

INTRODUCTION Retention of rehabilitation therapists (RTs) in rural areas is a growing problem in rural Australia. Current literature demonstrates that private allied health professionals in general remain longer in rural areas than those working in the public sector. However, government focus to enhance retention has been on those employed in the public sector, offering private practitioners li...

In this paper, we examine the relationships between health care visits to general practitioners, public and private sector specialists using data from Italy, which has a mixed public-private health care system. We develop a simultaneous equations model that allows for the discreteness of measures of utilization and estimate this model using maximum simulated likelihood. Once common unobserved h...

Pine polyphenols (PPs) are bioactive dietary constituents that enhance health and help prevent diseases through antioxidants. Antioxidants reduce the level of oxidative damages caused by ionizing radiation (IR). The main purpose of this paper is to study the protective effect of PPs on peripheral blood, liver and spleen injuries in mice induced by IR. ICR (Institute of Cancer Research) male mic...

Periodic elements play important roles in genomic structures and functions, yet some complex periodic elements in genomes are difficult to detect by conventional methods such as digital signal processing and statistical analysis. We propose a periodic power spectrum (PPS) method for analyzing periodicities of DNA sequences. The PPS method employs periodic nucleotide distributions of DNA sequenc...